I decided over the Christmas holidays that it was time to expand our horizons a little bit by moving our blog to its own server.  The main advantage over this compared to blogging at WordPress.com is that I have more control over the overall look and feel of the site.  Wordpress.com has done a good job of setting up a sandbox where you can’t really get hurt, but given that I always lean toward being an expert user, it felt like time to move on.

In the short term, there aren’t that many changes.  I’m still using the WordPress blogging tool, it’s just on a server where I can control things.  I’m also using a theme that is very similar to the one we were using before, and I’ve moved all of the content over from the old site to here.  

I have added a few things, though.  On the side bar, there are two new widgets.  One is a Feedjit.com live traffic map, which shows where people are visiting from, and the other is a link to a sign up for to receive an email whenever the site is updated.

On the downside, this new site is not integrated with the WordPress.com tag system anymore, which is sort of a bummer.  The main issue is that clicking on a tag will only take you to a page that show other pages on this site using that tag.  On WordPress.com, it takes you to a page that show other blogs using the same tag, which often led to discoveries of interesting new things and sometimes led other people to our site.  There may be a way to add this sharing capability back, but I haven’t figured it out yet.

I’ll probably be tweeking things a lot over the next few weeks, so let me know if you see anything weird.

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