Wednesday, February 24, 2010

ch-ch-changes...


Well, as regular readers of our efforts can see, we've made a few style changes to the blog today, mainly mandated due to the migration issues of our platform of publishing Blogger.

As we outlined yesterday, a change in the dynamic of the blogging format from Blogger required us to think out how to best approach the blog and how it functions.

The recent changes by Blogger had resulted in a serious reduction in the availability of our past posts, the archive system was not functioning as it had in the past and without the ability to reference one's past posts, the concept of a blog can be pointless.

So after spending far too much time reading over internal help forums and technical sites, we decided to take the giant leap forward into Bloggers Layout process.

This for the most part has worked fairly well, in fact we're rather pleased with the new look, it seems cleaner, easier to work with and offers up options for the future which could make the blog even more useful and enjoyable.

On the downside, as with any major renovation, some things go wrong, in the case of Podunk, we've lost all of our links that were featured on the right hand side of the old version of this blog. That isn't as big a disaster as I first feared, for the most part many of those links had grown old, I was getting lazy in weeding them out and had planned to restructure them at some point.

Blogger took that problem out of my hands I guess, though it was in effect clear cutting your garden when all you really needed was a weed eater, however, we'll rebuild those that we feel are important and maybe add new ones to replace those that are gone.

For certain we will create a one stop link for our items on City Council and other Podunkian developments, but in the short term it will be a bare bones kind of sidebar until we rebuild that section.

However, as far as the topic of our original concern, the availability of the archived material, the new system seems to be quite useful. It does take a bit of getting used to, there is a link at the bottom of the main page to seek out older posts, and in the archives section you can navigate through the months of years from day one.

We'll admit that we had a wee bit of trepidation as we prepared to hit the enter button this morning to transform the visual image of the blog and its various entries, but as they say, so far, so good.

Still there's much work to be done before we have it looking the way we want and more importantly the way our readers may like.

If there were features that are now missing that you may have enjoyed or indeed something that you may wish to see, drop us a line at podunkcan@yahoo.ca or leave a comment below and we'll see what we can do

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