Whitewater Freestyle

It has been a long time coming. But–finally–I got the time to give my whitewater blog some much needed TLC. I decided long ago that the beloved “Sandollar” theme for blogger was just hideous for its fluid width and inability to accurately display images. So, the time had come.

The old blog template--how ugly!

Over the past three weeks I had the opportunity to read the WordPress for Dummies book. I originally picked it up to start learning about theme-ing for WordPress; however, I saw a chapter in the very back of the book that talked about how to transfer nearly any blog to WordPress. I thought, “Wow, that’s a neat trick.” So, after some research and deliberation, I found a theme that I thought would accurately display my content, installed WordPress onto my FTP server (I realize that is going to be a bit of jargon for most, but it is basically yearly paid storage for websites), activated the theme, imported my content with the click-of-a-button, made some tweaks, and, finally, took the blog live by transferring the WhitewaterFreestyle.com domain to point to my FTP host (DNS servers for the techies).

So, after a bit of fuddling around, I am satisfied with the new look of my blog. I think that it will promote the images and text in a way that doesn’t dilute the content. Furthermore, I am no longer using Blogger as my blogging platform. After working with Blogger for a number of years (since 2006!), I am happy to transfer over to WordPress. There are several advantages including a larger theme pool to pick from, awesome plug-ins to do whatever you want, and, overall, it’s just simply easier to use.

Thinking of transferring your blog or getting a new template? Check out WordPress.org’s how to import content from other blog platforms and WordPress.org’s free theme directory. Note: WordPress.org is for those who pay money for web hosting. If you don’t throw down for web hosting (which most people do not), you can make an account with WordPress.com and import from other platforms for free (Blogger included!). And BLAM, just like that, you’ve hit the ground running.

If you don’t want to convert to WordPress, you could always Google for free Blogger (insert your platform here) templates. Some are actually quite nice.

Stay tuned for some epic photos from my recent Chile 2009-2010 trip. Cheers,

-Adam Johnson