This post is going up a little late and largely unedited because I ran into a few hiccups during my blog transfer process. Well, technically it is the Domain transfer that ran into issues, but I spent six hours on Saturday doing the whole blog transfer thing and there were plenty of hiccups in that process, so I’m comfortable generalizing. The thing is, since I own the domain broken-words.com, I want to continue using it at my new host, but that means transferring the domain between difference domain services. It’s a thing you can do, but the domain service that WordPress .com uses is incredible obtuse and difficult to use since there’s two places you can edit settings but each place only lets you edit certain settings. Which means that the transfer I attempted to do before leaving Wisconsin for Thanksgiving failed since the step-by-step guide I was following actually skipped a bunch of important steps. Turns out that the dirtbaggery of WordPress .com extends to trying to leave their service (who woulda thought?). So, while I have already gotten my blog set up at the new place, it’ll be undergoing some maintenance over the next few days, when the domain transfer finally goes through. I don’t want keep posting to a site that I’m going to have to potentially do a lot of work on, so I’m going to take a few more days off from posting (this next week), build up my buffer again (it shrank further because last week’s cleaning and then travel left me no spoons or even time for writing), and spend a little time making sure my new website is set up the way I want it to be.

So! In the meantime, you might notice a few things begin to change around here as I close off sections of my blog, remove access to a bunch of posts, and then eventually shut things down once I’ve gotten everything set up elsewhere. I’m working on figuring out some way for people to follow me over there, but I’m not sure how that’ll work since moving blogs doesn’t move followers. I might have to set up some kind of newsletter thing for people to sign up for email alerts (since I actually get clicks from those) and then some kind of social media attachment so I can more easily share my posts on whatever social media I’m using. RSS is still going to be set up and working at the new place, so if you follow me that way, you’ll still be able to click through to my posts or whatever it is you do. Once all that’s figured out and my website is up and running, I’ll change the home page for my blog to redirect people to my new website (which will just be at broken-words.com, once the domain switch is finished) or, so I can continue not paying Automattic any money, just set up a post with a link to my new home.

The biggest changes, aside from a few visuals that just can’t be replicated on the new things without more CSS knowledge than I have/can learn while doing everything else on my to-do list, are that I currently don’t have a way to automatically share my posts on the new website to my social media accounts and that I won’t be appearing in the WordPress .com reader anymore. I’ve thought about doing a post over here that will contain a link to the post of the same day on my new platform, but it would probably be better if I just started getting up early enough that I’d have the time to set up social media posts for 9am central time and shared things directly. I only have maybe two regular-ish readers from my WordPress .com followers these days and the only guaranteed social media click I have is the person who, shortly after it goes up, clicks every post link from the account I set up when Facebook stopped letting you auto-post to personal accounts. Once I have everything figured out at the new place, though, I’ll make sure my redirect post/page has all the information my followers will need or want to sign up for whatever access they need or want.

With all that written out and soon-to-be-shared, I think it’s time for me to return my focus to my day job, the presentation I’m preparing for this week, and my revamped website at its new home. I’ve got plenty of work left to do, after all, even if the most stressful parts of it are mostly done.