I’ve finally got my own url, server space, and moved over to WordPress. Please update all your necessary bookmarks and links. I’ll be adding things as time goes on. In the meantime welcome to the new Sean’s Russia Blog. I hope you enjoy. Please let me know what you think and if there are any changes I should make.
New Look For the Future
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Sean, the new look is great! As with many of the WordPress templates, the center column is too narrow at first glance – but it doesn’t really hurt readability. What I really want to know (as I consider making a similar change at long last) is how easy was it to transfer everything over? Can you estimate the total time it took you to transition to WordPress? Anyway, congrats on SRB 2.0.
Thanks Lyndon. Importing content from Blogger was really easy with WordPress 2.0. All it took was click. I had some trouble with the Russian character encoding, but that was a problem on my server side and not WordPress.
I worked on the site for about 3 weeks or so. But that was in between other more pressing matters. And I tried out a few templates until I decided on this one. The biggest pain was the links because Blogger doesn’t have any kind of export function. But going through them one by one allowed me to purge mislinked or dead links.
Seems almost all default blog templates have rather narrow columns for articles. I had to hunt a bit to find a pre-made format for Blogger 2.0 that had the big ole’ wide column that I crave.
I think the three column format is nicely organize though – you don’t have to scroll and scroll and scroll to find a link.
Glad the switch went off without a hitch!
Oh ya, and death to dead links!
I like it, though I miss the denser wide column of text. Then again, I liked the old no-graphics, long-articles, no color version of The Nation and still (over a decade later) wish they would go back. But I cope.
One small possible tweak: is it possible to put the link to the comments at the bottom of the post so one can easily click it at the conclusion of reading, rather than scroll back up? That’d be my preference, but obviously it’s not a big deal.
Congratulations, and welcome to the joys of hosting your own website. I love the header picture.
One minor thing you might want to fix is the feed URLs you display on the sidebar – the one on the right sidebar points to the seansrussiablog.org feed, but the feedburner one on the left sidebar points to… well… the feedburner feed.
I only notice this problem, as I do exactly the same on my site, and I’ve been meaning to fix it for ages…
Great job! It’s a very good looking design.
Thanks for the approval Andy and James. I fixed the feed problem. Thanks for pointing it out. I would have never seen it.
The header picture is a photo my girlfriend took in Kaluga. Its some billboard she stumbled upon.
Buster, I’m working on moving the comments to the bottom of the post. If anyone knows let me know.
Love the new look. Your’s is one of the few Russia blogs that I regularly check in anticipation of my move to Moscow. Nice job and a great look.
Looks good — I especially like the header photo. Although, I too would prefer a wider center section, but maybe this will be my excuse to upgrade to a wide screen monitor.
I updated the other Russian Blog section of my site with your new URL. I’ll watch it out over the next few days to make sure that it is working correctly as it adds your new posts.
looks like spam blocker block too hard
Just noticed that ivanov. My apologies. I tend to hate spam blockers in general because I don’t trust them. If this problem continues, I’ll have to find another one.
Sean: The new site looks like a real improvement. Of course, it will be at the top of my ‘Favorites’ list. Keep up the good work. Next time in Moscow! CM
I think you should add a “Girls of Sean’s Russia Blog” section. Bikinis, bear-skin rugs, that sort of thing.
Great new look. However, the site search engine doesn’t seem to pick up a good deal of material from the old design which included a different URL. One can still find such material via the Archives field to the right of this new design.