Welcome!

If you’re here, you’ve probably come over from my old blog. Or maybe not! In any case, welcome!

In this post I wanted explain a few things, before I jump into just posting normally on here.

Maybe starting with my reasons for moving. So the old blog, I’ve had it since 2008, and around 2010 (I think?) I moved to self-hosted Wordpress. I bought the Thesis theme, which was all the rage among the fashion bloggers (which is what I was then) and I loved it. I enjoyed the messing about with the code, and trying plugins and stuff. I had a lot of time pre-kids and also being a bit understretched at work. There was a big active blogger community, and I remember a lot of the chat being ‘do I need to post more than once a day’, which seems insane now when everything is so diversified and once a week is seen as often.

The blog set up on Oranges and Apples is still pretty much what it was back then, because obviously in 2012 I had Milo and that was really the end of plentiful free time for me. This all coincided with the slow death of blogging as a widespread hobby thing, as Google reader shut down and some people professionalised and the rest of us started moving to instagram as an outlet for our online interactions. I was actually quite a late instagram adopter, and I still mourn personal blogging (I mean, how much easier would the knitting racism discussions be if they weren’s conducted on insta stories? But that’s a topic for another time, maybe), but eventually I got caught up in it. Certainly more people see my instagram than they read this blog!

Anyway, so I was moving along quite happily, then Wordpress changed their editor and it was just a nightmare. Took ten minutes to load the editor, and then to load the preview, and the thing with the blocks just added weird spacing in everywhere (though there was a code view which let me carry on pretty much as before). Then I started getting a warning mesage saying I needed to update my PHP version (still not really sure what that is), so I did that, and it crashed my blog. So I had to go on the tech support chat with my hosting provider (which admittedly, was a lot less painful than some support chats I’ve been on) and get them to change it back, because my old shitty PHP version wasn’t even on the list any more. I tried to find out what was making the site crash with the newer PHP, but all the tests I ran told me everything was compatible, so I still don’t know. Then one day the server randomly decided to update my PHP without me telling it to. Cue blog offline for most of the day, tech support chat etc. I got it fixed again but obviously I felt a bit at the mercy of the server, if it’s going to randomly update sites. And it’s not ideal to be using this outdated version, which WP kept telling me was unsafe. It became clear that there was something wrong with my technology that if I wanted to go on I would need to resolve.

Through this whole process I also discovered that my hosting is up at the end of October 2019 (I had paid for three years in one go so had forgotten) and that was the last straw. I didn’t want to hand over any more money for a thing that didn’t work, and/or would require lots of effort to make work. I played around with the idea of going on a free blog website, but that would essentially mean Wordpress again which I’m trying to get away from, and I hate those spammy adverts. And I’m fine with paying for good service, so in the end I decided to go Squarespace. I’m really happy with the set up, it’s super user friendly and even though it uses blocks like the new WP, it loads instantly and doesn’t space things randomly. And most of all, everything is in one place, so everything should always be working and I’m not having to make separate domain registrations, hosting, wordpress and verious plugins match up. One thing tha is a bit different is that I will be uploading photos directly into it rather than throiugh flickr, I did like the click through option for the Project 52. But I can live with that.

So that’s me! I’ve moved over all my 2019 posts, and a handful of other ones. If you’re a long term reader and there’s anything not here you think should be, please let me know. The other website is up until 31 October.