Blogger conversion

I had a couple of clients who were using Blogger as their blogging platform, and updating through FTP, which is no longer available as of yesterday. I got both of their blogs converted and updated so that they could continue to update their blogs through Blogger as they always had.

I hadn't decided what to do about mine. I had been thinking about converting to Wordpress, and I also thought that I could just do the blog manually, like I used to. Last night I sat down and opened up the test Wordpress blog that I set up months ago, but I just couldn't do it. I wasn't ready to give up the template that I had designed. I know that you can use customized designs with Wordpress if you install the software on your own server, but I just wasn't ready to tackle that, either. And all of the links I have in the sidebar; I would have to either give them up, or duplicate them.

So I thought, well, I'll just do the blog manually like I used to, and I started working on templates, stripping out the Blogger code, and then I realized that I was breaking ALL of the previous entries. So I had to start backtracking, undoing, checking . . . What a pain.

I ended up converting the blog to a "Blogspot" blog, which means that future entries will be on Blogger/Google's servers, not on my own. I will back them up, of course. I had to do a bunch of work on the templates anyway, to make everything work, and I stopped the conversion before it got to the point where it adds forwarding code, so all of the previous entries haven't been affected. I would appreciate it if anyone notices anything weird, or something that doesn't work, if they would let me know. Now, for every image and every link, I have to put in the complete path, which is also a pain, and not really good code, but it'll have to do.

Last September (I looked it up -- the benefits of having an online journal) we had weird electrical problems, but Bob fixed it, and I didn't worry about it anymore. Then on Wednesday or Thursday he called me at work and said that we were having the same kind of issues, that he thought he needed to replace the GFI, but for now the outlets in the bathrooms didn't work.

When I got home that night I put water on the stove to boil, and when I turned on the burner, the lights in the kitchen dimmed, like a brownout. Deja vu. I turned off the stove, the lights came back on, I turned it on, the lights went out. The GFI had tripped, so I reset it, and then all the lights on the first floor stayed out. I went down to the basement to check the breakers; they were all on, but I flipped them just in case. Nothing happened, so I went upstairs, where we had lights, and read.

When Bob got home, he replaced the GFI, but it didn't help. He tried several things, with me running up and down the basement stairs to flip the breaker on and off, but no luck. So he talked to an electrician friend of his, who came over the next day to check things out. They discovered that it was a bad breaker outside--they said it was actually melted, and broken, so it was definitely good that we discovered it when we did!

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