Hello WordPress

It’s been great having a reliable and free space online to hold my thoughts on LiveJournal. It’s been great being able to peer into the lives of my friends that blog there, with everyone’s posts collected and organized into one simple ‘friends’ page. And it’s been great meeting people from all over Texas and the United States through it’s wonderful means of online communication. In fact, if it weren’t for LiveJournal, I wouldn’t be going out with Stephen today.

 

But I think one of the main reasons I stuck with Livejournal all these years was because everyone else had one and it’s all I’ve known for quite a while. It’s the same reason I still have a Myspace (kinda of), but I’ll save Myspace babble for another post. There wasn’t a good enough reason for me to leave el-jay, as much as I wanted to.

 

Don’t get me wrong. I like the fact that it’s free, like email, but I hate the fact that it looks so shitty. It has no real design and looks like how the internet looked back in the early days using basic html – like those crappy websites you made in that computer class you had to take in public school.

 

But everyone was on it. And it was free. The only way you could’ve gotten a well-designed, easily customizable blog back in the day was to pay for it.

 

There was a point in my life where I actually imagined getting one of those fancy paid accounts through Six Apart’s TypePad for serious bloggers, professionals or for those who wanted more than their current weblog service. They were well designed yet left enough room for creative freedom. I thought about paying 100, even 150 dollars a year just to get a group account that could host an unlimited amount of blogs by an unlimited amount of users. I would invite all my friends that had blogs to join me, possibly arranging some way for them to help me with the tab, if they wanted to. But I knew that would’ve been too complicated. Even now switching over to any blog is complicated, if you want to move all your older entries over anyways.

 

But times have changed. LiveJournal isn’t the only good, free weblog service out there anymore. Sure, there was always Xanga. Sure, Myspace has its bulletins and Facebook has its notes (of which this blog is linked to btw). But now there’s a new league of blogging experiences – Blogger and WordPress, both of which offer a variety of interesting functions, design schemes and other knicks and knacks that most people didn’t think. For instance, on Blogger you can add Google AdSense on your blog to earn revenue or post entries straight from your cell phone. And on WordPress you can add categories to your posts to link entries with similar themes, and it also has built in blog stats and a spam blocker.

 

It’s all a matter of preference I guess, but the main reason I chose WordPress over Blogger was because you can import your old journal entries (saved as XML files) into your WordPress blog. No copying and pasting. No redating, etc. Lucky you if you’re a PC user, because there’s a handy little desktop application called ljArchive, which can export all of your journal entries to your computer into one big XML file that you can import into WordPress. Blogger.com has yet to add an import feature and was the main reason why I chose WordPress over Blogger. I, on the other hand, took the more difficult route, and downloaded every month in which I had made a post from LiveJournal, named and saved it into a folder and then uploaded the files one by one to WordPress. I was that stubborn.

 

I could have started WordPress anew. I didn’t have to move all my posts. I could have left my adolescence and my teenage angst, my emotional rants and mutilated usage of the English language, to live (and die) on LiveJournal. But I didn’t. I’m not ashamed of my past, as good or bad things may or may not have been. I don’t want to forget it. And more importantly, I don’t want to be forgotten either.

 

After living life up to where it is now, I’ve come to realize that life is too short, and too small for most people. There are 6.5 billion people living on this earth, and that number keeps climbing. I’ve been to a lot of places across the country and seen the people there. Who am I in this sea of people? Am I nobody? I certainly don’t want to be nobody. I don’t want to drink or smoke or drug abuse or idle my life away. I want to be somebody. Someone remembered, even if it’s only by a select few. But I hope it’s more than that.

 

That’s why I have made a WordPress account and moved my blog to this web service. If people really care about me or want to know the goings-on in my life, then they’ll come and read this blog, in the same sense that people look at individual Myspaces and Facebooks. I would treat people I cared about the same way. It may be a little unorthodox, but sometimes change is good. I feel that sometimes people don’t like to change the way they live because they are comfortable with how their lives are currently and don’t want to find that something that could make their life better or easier. Sometimes, people even know of these different ways that are available to them, that can change their lives for the better, but don’t want to put the effort into trying them out, into changing.

 

I don’t expect everyone to follow my suit. But I do encourage it. If not WordPress then something else that is better suited (and better in general) for your needs.

 

P.S. – If you need help saving/moving journal files, just email me.

~ by thisguyukno on May 3, 2007.