Two Halfs Posts Make One Whole Post

I had two things I briefly wanted to mention which I didn’t want to dedicate a whole post to:

• I sent in my last car payment back in November, and last week in the mail, I received the title from the bank that gave us the loan. I bought Jeeves (my car) about a year and a half ago, and under our five-year loan, was supposed to have him paid off in 2012. We’ve been paying aggressively on the loan ever since, and I’m glad that we managed to pay it off roughly 3 1/2 years ahead of time. Dave Ramsey would be proud (except that he would chastise us for buying a car in the first place that we couldn’t afford to buy with cash).

• In other news, I almost switched The Doc File over to Wordpress this week, but ended up not doing it. I’m having a hard time finding a template that I really like, and while there are some things about Wordpress I like, it’s not as user-friendly as Blogger is and doesn’t allow for as much (free) customization. I don’t know, I still might end up switching, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it the other night. I know, I’m a coward.
  

A Change Ahead?

For a while now, I’ve been thinking about moving The Doc File to another blogging service.

There are things about Blogger that I like a lot: it’s free, it’s very customizable, and the Blogger people are always working to improve things and make it better.

What really kills me about Blogger though is how terrible its templates are. By my count there are only 16 templates to choose from (with color variations of each), and most of those are very similar to each other (so it’s more like having about five templates).

As I said earlier, one of the nice things about Blogger is that you can customize a template to the way you want it. I’ve tweaked the HTML code of my blog considerably to produce the current results, but at the end of the day, there are things about my blog that I really don’t like and I’m not nearly good enough with HTML to fix them.

The main feature I would like on my blog is page management (at least, that’s what WordPress calls it), which would enable my blog to contain separate sections, and make it more of a website and less of a blog.

For example, currently, in order to have an “About Me” section, I have to write a post, and then link to it in my sidebar. I’d much prefer for it to be a separate page rather than a blog post, and for it to appear in a navigational bar (this may not seem like a big deal to you, but to a person with some obsessive-compulsive tendencies like myself, it is).

So the simple solution would seem to be switching to WordPress, which has better templates and several which support page management.

But, while WordPress is free in its most basic form, if you want to do any real customization (other than just switching the picture in your header), you have to pay money, which I don’t necessarily mind, but I’d like to know exactly what I’d have to pay in order to get what I want.

And apparently, there’s a distinction between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, and that doesn’t make this process any easier for me.

So, any WordPress, blogging, or general computer experts out there want to give me some advice?

Cool Feature: Scheduled Post Publishing

There are some things about Blogger that I don’t like very much, but one thing I do like is that they are always trying to improve their services (which are entirely free by the way, which is another thing I like).

With Blogger in Draft, Blogger users have the option of trying out new features before they are released to the public. The newest Blogger in Draft feature: Scheduled Post Publishing.

Scheduled Post Publishing enables you to write a post and set it to publish at a specific time in the future. For example, although I’m writing this post Tuesday morning, it won’t actually show up on my blog until around 8:00 AM on Wednesday morning.

For sporadic bloggers like myself, this is a neat feature. Sometimes, I’ll go an entire week without posting, and then have three posts in two days. In this relative flurry of activity, some posts hardly get noticed because they show up as the most recent post for only a short period of time.

With Scheduled Post Publishing I should be able to spread out my posts to where new content appears on a more regular basis. Or at least, that’s the hope.