Big news! I finally bit the bullet and moved over to a new domain, shanehalbach.com!
Since I haven’t had a new look for about 2 years, and really haven’t changed my color scheme since 2004, I decided to go for something totally different. I may be tweaking things for a day or two until everything gets resolved, but I think it is more or less set at the moment. I’m really enjoying the change of pace!
If I did everything correctly, you should not even need to update your feeds. The old url (erith1.wordpress.com) should now redirect here.
So enjoy everyone! Let me know what you think in the comments.
-The Management
Shane Halbach 
Looks like “congrats” are in order again. I expect the quality of posts to remain the same, and will continue to follow.
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I’m mostly wondering, “How did he do that?” because I really haven’t expended any energy in figuring out how to make the blog look different, although I’m contemplating moving it over to our domain and using wordpress.
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It was so ridiculously simple that I am professionally embarrassed to admit it.
I am still on Wordress.com. I just bought the new domain for $5 (through WordPress) and then paid $12 (per year) to map my existing blog to the new domain. Then I just used a different (free) template from WordPress. The whole thing took me $17 and less than 30 minutes. (Of course I spent 30 minutes deciding which template to use and another 45 minutes or so rearranging my side-bar widgets and re-writing the “About this blog” page to say “left” instead of “right”, etc. because I’m OCD like that.)
So the whole thing was really just a snap of the fingers. I had been holding out until I could get a custom domain, my own hosting, install WordPress.org stuff, write my own CSS, etc. But it turns out that I probably wasn’t ever going to do that, because it would be weeks and weeks worth of work. So instead I just spent a tiny bit of time and totally changed everything.
For you guys, who already have a domain and stuff, you could probably do WordPress.org on your own (of course, you can map a WordPress.com blog to a sub-domain on another site, but I digress). The advantage is that you’re running everything yourself, so you have a lot more freedom (for example, you can’t just run any old javascript you want on WordPress.com, but you could on your own site). Also you don’t have to pay a yearly fee (other than what you already pay for your own stuff).
But this was so nice and easy, I wish I had done it years ago. There’s not much I would do different if I did have my own site, but it would be a lot more work. The only thing I don’t like is that anybody could use this template and have a site that looked just like mine. I kind of prefer something unique. I could buy an upgrade from WordPress for another $15 a year if I really cared that much about it, but for now I’m good with the stock stuff. Maybe someday.
Anyway, whether you do it under your own domain or not, I would totally encourage you to switch over from Blogger to WordPress though. If I loved WordPress anymore, I’d have to dump Sara.
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Ah. Part of why I want to change is the template thing. I just don’t have the skillz to design something of the caliber I want. I am sick of Blogger, though, and some of it’s annoying idiosyncrasies.
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Very snazzy!
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You had me lost at “moved over to a new domain”. Very impressive if for no other reason than you knew how to do this. It does seem to be easier to find your other blogs.
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You had me lost at “moved over to a new domain”. Very impressive but this is all beyond my comprehension. It does seem to be easier to look up previous blogs.
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