First Blogger, then Typepad, then iWeb, then RapidWeaver, now WordPress. That’s been my blogging adventure. I’m ready to settle down and get back to writing.
I’ve got a new site. It has the same address, but it’s like starting over in many ways. Fortunately, I was able to bring all my old posts and comments over from Typepad. Those would have been lost if I had stayed with iWeb or RapidWeaver.
I noticed this morning that RapidWeaver was not updating the RSS feed. That would mean that the posts weren’t showing up in newsreaders or going out to those who subscribe by email. In that case, I’m going to give you links to the last few posts, in case you haven’t seen them.
Concordia – June 25th
Month in Review – August 8
Back At It – August 17
These posts are a start in explaining the crazy-ness of this summer. I hope that even though school has started again and I’ll be busier than ever, I’ll still have time to write a little here. And I hope that you’ll still take the time to read.
I have many more things that I want to put together on the site. I think the site and the feed should be working as normal, but I’d like your help. Would you do me a favor and leave a comment, letting me know how you read the post (email, Google Reader, another newsreader, directly from the web site).
A Shepherd's Story 
Welcome back to the blogosphere, Hans! I look forward to more top-notch, orthodox Lutheran material from your blog.
In response to your request…
– I read your post first in my Google newsreader
– Then I visited your blog through the link on my blog to make sure I had the right URL
Looks great and God’s blessings!
In Christ,
Jeremiah
Good to see you blogging again. I get all my RSS feeds on a My Yahoo page, but I can only read a sentence or two there and so I end up coming to your site to read the full post.
I’ve thought about switching to Google Reader, but don’t want to do the work of setting things up again. Maybe someday.
I am technology challenged so I read (and enjoy) “A Shepherd’s Story as an e-mail.
I receive “A Shepherd’s Story” as an email.
I found you by searching “blogging with iWeb.” I have built what I think is a nice web site there, but I am not sure it will be satisfactory for blogging. I have the iLife suite and SnowLeopard, yet, I am not sure I want to sign up for MobileMe, as the web site and storage is all the use I will get out of it. I want folks to be able to comment on my blog, and I would like to enable Archives and Categories, as well as a couple Google ads in a side bar, plus easily copy the blog to LiveJournal and, possibly Facebook. I like your blog format, and noticed you had originally planned to use iWeb and ended up on WordPress. Did you find that iWeb did not serve you sufficiently? Thanks so much for any help.
Karen: iWeb was (and is) great for simplicity and ease of use. It’s a hard one to weigh the pros and cons. On the one hand, I liked the flexibility of iWeb. You can just drag things wherever you want. In fact, you could totally change the look of every single page. You don’t have to rely on the templates. But on the other hand, it can be very easy for things to get out of hand. If you make a change on one page of your iWeb site, there is no easy way to make that change across pages. The uniformity of CSS templates makes that more consistent, but you give up the flexibility. I have also found that iWeb sites tend to load more slowly. If you had a really simple blog, maybe iWeb will do the trick. But perhaps it’s not worth the price for MobileMe. I like MobileMe because I use it for much more than that (email, syncing calendars and contacts with the iPhone, BacktoMyMac). But I realized that for now, blogging was best done somewhere else. Now that said, I’m still using iWeb for my church’s web site (www.trinityelpaso.org). That works better, since it’s not as complicated. I love the simplicity of iWeb’s html snippets.
I like WordPress so far. Free hosting is good, though you will note that you won’t be able to put ads on a WordPress.com site. You can do that only if you host WordPress yourself (wordpress.org). You can do that for under $5 a month from some place like GoDaddy.
Hope that helps.