As you know, not long ago this site moved from a Blogspot blog this this shiny new thing!

This is just a quick note to say that all of our feeds will be changing soon and if you’re not on the new feed you may stop getting all our wonderful information!

If you signed up on the old blogger blog then please subscribe to either the RSS or Email updates.

If you signed up on this new site (overlandwannabe.co.uk) then you do not need to do a thing!

Thanks for your support.

I have been attempting to grow the traffic on this site since I first started blogging.

I have concentrated a lot on the magical world of search engine optimisation and found this to be a bit of a “dark art” that is incomprehensible to most, although having an SEO plugin for wordpress seems to be helping, expect a post on that soon (when I actully know more about it).

Technorati - what is it?

As for other sites for social media; Digg is widely regarded as the grand-daddy of all of them and then there is StumbleUpon, which pretty much does exactly what it says on the tin.

But I was quite interested in Technorati, it is completely blog focused and seemed to have more “things” than I have seen on the other sites.

So off I went to find out more. Technorati states that:

Technorati was founded to help bloggers succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the global online conversation. Founded as the first blog search engine, Technorati has expanded to a full service media company providing services to the blogs and social media sites and connecting them with advertisers who want to join the conversation, and whose online properties introduce blog content to millions of consumers.

So I am now signed up, have entered all my information and you can now find my profile here

The steps for your own profile are reasonably simple: creating your own profile, creating your blog profile, adding a description (250 characters max) and adding keywords.  Nice and easy so far.

Back to my profile page after the set up and I have an authority of 0 (zero).  hmmm.  Next up – how on earth to increase this rating.

Well that my dear readers wil come in another post.  As I am still actually finding this out.  See, I told you that this blog was indeed “live”.

I have an idea of how to work Technorati but I really need to investigate.

Have you got any information on how Technorati works?

Ok, well on my previous post I discussed the kind of things you should think about when transferring from Blogger to WordPress.

Patty Mooney commented on that post and asked:

I am curious why you decided to transfer to WordPress from Blogger? Looking back, would you do it again?

Well that will make a good post, thought I,  and so here it is.

First of all, Why set up a blog on Blogger?

I am a bit of a Google convert to be honest.  I love GMAIL, Adwords, Google Analytics, Google Connect, Google Docs etc, etc (and it really is a long list!) So it was only natural for me to set up a blog on Google’s blogging service, Blogger.

I didn’t really research into WordPress too much, at the time I set up my original blog WordPress 2.7 was just a sparkle on the motherboards at WordPress.  The older version did have loads of people recommending them, at the end of almost every post about how good WordPress there was the word “BUT”.  And then a whole load of things that WordPress was bad, slow or just confusing at doing.

So with my blogger blog set up and running, and with a boost from Blogger by being nominated at “Blogs of Note” (which resulted in over 20,000 visits) why on earth would I change?

What are the limitations of Blogger?

Now I’m not going to discuss all of them, but only the ones that were relevant to me.

First point was the ability to add pages, I wanted to have organised content so that people could easily search through, find the information they wanted more easily.  Secondly I also wanted the ability to add contact forms, places for a store (secret project coming soon!) and other ways to make more money online.

I am also a bit of a geek, well actually quite a large geek.  Having my own domain and the ability to add Plugins, Widgets and complete access to my own domain, add to that my own email domains an hey presto, that’s the geek in me fulfilled.

Also I wanted to have a professional looking site that would allow me some funky ways to access and upload to it.  having FTP access allows me to upload things much more quickly than having to wait for Blogger’s image uploader.  All of thee are things that I had to think about for travelling – time on Internet = money, even more so than when online at home.

Of course the final push came from trying out a free wordpress blog first of all.

The immense plugins library and availability of themes really tipped it for me.

I have a plugin for a contact form, a plugin for search engine optimisation, a plugin that automatically creates a sitemap, a plugin that automatically cuts posts to previews, a plugin that enhances the site search (try it, it’s load of fun) and there is also a secret plugin, if you leave a comment you will find out what it is!

And – These plugins are so easy to use!

There is no painful set up  – most of them do not require any coding skills or to even touch the website’s code!  All I need to do is download, unzip and upload the plugin into my library and WHAM, I can see it in my Plugins page on the admin area – go into it’s own settings page and that is it.

And I think that is the real beauty of WordPress.  Think of it as being the iron structure within a skyscraper, you can clad the outside however you want and also furnish the inside of the structure to make it work the way you want it and look the way you want.

Having the ability to grow and expand this site was a major factor in changing to WordPress.

Looking back, Would I do it again?

Yes – I can definitely state that I would still have moved from Blogger to WordPress.  I would of course do it differently, but then again, would I know what I know now?

I’d say to everyone to think carefully about changing your blog. I know for a fact that I got it wrong, I moved too quickly and had a far too complex template to start off with.

Have you changed your address or service or are you looking to? Or do you have any further questions, please add them to the comments below and I’ll reply to you.

Bring on the trumpets, roll out the red carpet and marvel at the wonder.

Yes the front page is just one of the massive changes we’ve made around here.

You may also notice the menu bars at the top, where all the pages reside and the wonderful categorised posts to allow you all to find your way to the information you want an awful lot easier.

I would love to hear from you all, both old readers from my blogger blog and new readers who have found this site.  Posts will be more focused now on the conversion side of things, as the new van is coming soon.  After that we will have a little spree of planning posts then off to the travel posts!

We’re also planning for a little video action here as well, all in time though folks.  Unfortunately I am a man, meaning I am unable to multi-task.  A woman could have probably created this site in half the time, but then again a woman….. No, had better not.  I’d be shot, or at least loose some readers.

Well enough of the chitter chatter.  Please Bookmark this page, subscribe to the feeds or subscribe to the email feed, all of these can be done using the links at the top right hand side of this page.

Are you thinking about doing your own thing like this site?  contact ITSimple.co.uk

Well, I’m breaking out the champagne, who’s joining me?

Hey hey!

I finally got round to that “makeover” I promised ages ago. Come check it out and let me know what you think. I’m off to fix the comments facility on a friend’s blog.

Happy Travellin’
OverlandSi
(In a considerably better mood than I was earlier, but still don’t want to go back to work)