We've Moved!

Ok. More like I've moved.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, one week of sleepless nights, murdered braincells, nearly-slit-wrists and free-host-hating later, I present to you my new WordPress powered blog:

ALMOST FAYE-MOUS 2.0

Please, please, please update your links. http://fayemin.5gigs.com. If you don't, then my stats won't be accurate and my valuation at blogshares decreases. If the link doesn't work, it's server problems- AGAIN. I haven't resolved those yet, although things are improving. This is just a temporary place until I get some REAL hosting. Till then, this will serve the purpose.

If you don't get my new blog and the page doesn't load, or it gives you some weird error message, don't worry. Don't bother refreshing over and over, just try again MUCH later. If it's down, I can't blog either so you're not missing out on anything.

While I am extremely excited about this upgrade, it is with a heavy heart and much regret that I am leaving Blogger. It has been good to me for this past year and a half and 524 posts.

What made me decide to leave? A couple of weeks ago, I was approached by the school newspaper, the Ke Alaka'i about blogging on BYUH (smart people, them). I began to reply the e-mail with this lengthy splurge on how different blogging services attract different types of bloggers.

For example, MySpace is what was most popular among BYUH students because it is a networking program. I don't like MySpace very much because I find it much too cluttered and, well, I don't enjoy that crowd very much. Plus, they breed fake bloggers. PeOple wh0 tIpE lyke DIz doN'T DeEzerVe 2 B cAlLed bL0gGeRz. I was very glad when the school (yes, my lovely control freak school) blocked MySpace for porn. Ha-ha. Seriously, porn wouldn't have been so bad. That was worse than porn.

So I talked about that and a few other blogging programs, and mentioned that Blogger (what this blog is on) usually (but not always) attracts more serious bloggers because there is the filter of HTML. I went on to say that blogger is easily the best blogging service out there.

Wait a minute... I had to stop for a moment. Movable Type produces some really nice blogs too. Nicer, in fact. With more features. But people have to pay for that. Hmmm. So the best FREE blogging service then? Then I realized that I really didn't have much to back my claim that Blogger is the best because I hadn't tried all the bloggng services out there. The only reason I was on Blogspot was because Jared followed Steph and Wendy into it - and I followed suit. Not because I thought it was the best program then. I'd tried Xanga, Friendster, MySpace, LiveJournal and decided they all suck now, but there were so many more that I didn't try. I worried that if I had tried those first, I wouldn't be such a big advocate of blogger.

So I went on a mad frenzy that day, signing up for all sorts of different accounts, reading up on articles that compared them. Then I discovered Blogsome. Blogsome is one of the few blogging services out there that uses the WordPress interface. I didn't know what Wordpress was then, but I got to try some things out on Blogsome and was really impressed.

I've seen a lot of blogs by WordPress before, in fact, all the coolest blogs like Feminist Mormon Housewives, Times and Seasons, etc. that used to be on Blogspot moved to their own host and were powered by WordPress. I went to check out WordPress before but couldn't figure what the heck that was (just like I still, for the life of me, can't figure out the whole RSS feed thing). Blogsome gave me the exposure I needed to WordPress and enough frustration at the limitations for me to decide that I needed to get WordPress for myself.

So after another mad frenzy of hunting for hosts with MySql, I finally got set up and that was the beginning of a blogging revolution for Faye. Seriously, WordPress is THE BEST publishing platform there is out there. Why? There is no limit to what you can do with it. This application is free and I don't know much about the open source movement (or whatever you call it) but this is, I guess a huge part of that. Basically, these people develop software for the sake of developing software. Not for profit, but for the sake of technology. People have written all sorts of plugins and add ons to it and they are constantly coming up with new versions. I was worried at first that they didn't have a good knowledge base or a "help" to turn to, but it is HUMONGOUS. There are forums and plugin and template competitions and all sorts of bloggers who write instructions and directions and code.

I guess what pleases me the most is that the cream of the crop of the blogging world use wordpress. The programming nerd breed of people who know what they're doing and take blogging seriously. Of course I wasn't going to let myself be left behind.

WordPress has allowed me to do many things that Blogger hasn't yet, like Categories, editing comments, calendars... while I still will say that Blogger is one of the best services out there because they give you quite a bit of flexibility, I now know that there is much more that you can do as a blogger.

So I have moved. Upgraded to a new platform. I feel like a pokemon who just evolved. Yay me! I will still use blogger, I'm sure. I have other blogs and all of you still on here, but it won't be quite the same anymore.

To those of you who are intersted in moving up a notch in blogging world, I highly recomment WordPress. If you're confused about what it is, or how to use it, I'll be more than happy to help. Unfortunately, I can't think of too many of you who will appreciate it as much as I do. For most of you, it might be best to keep things simple. But hey, I didn't learn HTML until I started blogging here. I've learned so many things in the past week since WordPress. I don't think I'm smarter than the average person. You could learn how to do it too.

Anyway, this post is way too long. It's weird to think that it's my last one here. Maybe that's why I'm rambling.

I've turned off commenting so that I don't have to keep aligning 2.0 and this blog. If you have something to say, you can say it there.

Well, here's to a new beginning! Aloha oe, blogger. It's been wonderful.