Blogging

Welcome to the New 10,000 Birds!

October 9, 2006 by Mike 6 Comments

Notice anything different around here? If you’ve ever visited this site before, you’re probably wondering if you’re in the right place. Yes, this is still 10,000 Birds, but as you might surmise from the fancy new logo and layout, much has changed.

The most significant structural change is that 10,000 Birds is now being published on the phenomenal WordPress platform. Since its inception, this blog has been published through Microsoft FrontPage, which, while good for certain things, is most decidedly not a blogging program. I have, for the last three years, been trying to make the site look like a blog and feel like a blog, even though I had no access to many of the bells and whistles that differentiate blogs from regular old webpages. I may have learned to hack a feed and permalinks and even managed toeventually integrate comments, but every post required extra work to make these features go. And while I’ve been trying to cobble together my own primitive platform, a veritable brain trust of altruistic coders conspired to create an unparalleled open-source solution that seems to get better every single day.

The decision really wasn’t hard to make. What’s been challenging has been the process itself. First I had to envision what I wanted my new site to look like. Then, of course, I had to learn enough about HTML and CSS to realize my vision. Thanks to the wealth of available WordPress resources from themes to plugins to support forums, I’m well on my way.

Migrating from one blog platform to another is usually a simple process; manually moving more than three years of content is not. Integrating all my old posts and pages into this new site will take weeks, if not months. Since the old stuff is still available, I have the luxury of time, which I badly need. I still don’t know how to put together a decent Links or Archive page, nor do I have the patience to reproduce more than a handful of old posts at a time. Instead, I’m going to try to migrate the old 10,000 Birds in such a way as to make the new one better. Let me know how I’m doing!

One last note, which I will repeat periodically: my old RSS feed will no longer be updated. Please subscribe to the new 10,000 Birds feed.

Written by Mike
Mike is a leading authority in the field of standardized test preparation, but he's also a traveler who fully expects to see every bird in the world. Besides founding 10,000 Birds in 2003, Mike has also created a number of other entertaining but now extirpated nature blog resources, particularly the Nature Blog Network and I and the Bird.