Wordpress Coming Soon to christianallaire.com

Moored Naples Florida. Doing?

Working@ Ridgeway Bar & Grill

Moving to California in May. Why? Click Here
For a more complete history of me and sailing click here. 

 

I have thoroughly enjoyed learning about blogs and blogging over the passed three plus years. The original idea for a blog was planted by Tom & Amy from Sandpiper.   They used Blogger for their journey from California, west-about to St John USVI where they now call home. I had to have one. And so I do. The blog has become an enjoyable labor of love. I always say, I love that folks take the time to read the blog, comment and send me emails. Please keep it up! But the main mission is for my own personal gratification. It's my log book of life. The blog has pushed me in different areas that I never imagined. It has forced me to think a little more deeply, to observer a little closer, because I may have to put what I'm thinking or feeling or observing into words. A daily event or situation forces me to assess, is it blog worthy? At one point I was getting tired of writing so much, so I thought well I'll just take more pictures and let them do the talking. Picture is worth a thousand words type of thing. This pivot hurtled me into an interest in photography, or a re-invigoration more accurately, because in 7th grade I loved the photography club. I dug the old school dark room development process. Of course now I needed to learn about management of a digital library and digital photography which lead me into the world of High Definition video and editing. All this sprung from my simple desire to let the folks back home know where I was and how I was doing on my sailing voyage. This is life.

My evolution continues. I originally started out on Sailblogs and still have my sailblogs site up and running. I found sailblogs limiting (has since gotten better) but became aggravated when I found out that Google Adsense revenue generated from my blog (granted, pennies) was going into the pocket of the owners of sailblogs. I decided to go the way of Sandpiper and start a blog on Blogger. Blogger has many more options and is easier to personalize and I could use my own domain name, christianallaire.com. I thought I was on it like Blue Bonnet, but since have learned that Blogger is still considered rookie ville. 

Enter Wordpress.org This is where the more serious go to to crank it up a few notches. Wordpress.org is a publishing platform that creates websites. It is all very complicated to new folks, me included. The learning curve is steep and I'm still on the first hill. Over the past month I have been working on this project. I have a Wordpress.org website now being hosted on a sever I pay for each month. Files are transferred via FTP and once a theme is downloaded, I can manipulate the layout and color and feel of the website to my own liking. The rub is, you must start to learn how to write CSS Code. I have no idea how long this will take me. But when you click on a professional website like Nikonfestival or Queens College you know you've logged onto a professional product. In terms of making the switch, from the reader point of view, you'll never do anything different. When the new christianallaire.com is ready for prime time, I simply assign christianallaire.com as the domain name for my new blog and you'll automatically see the new site. The new site will of course have all my archives and what not.

I love my Blogger blog and spent a good deal of time learning how to upgrade it. So why switch again? I would like to improve and with Wordpress.org, I can endlessly tweak the website as new technology is created or improved upon. But the biggest reason is that Blogger (owned by google) owns my content as the blog resides on their servers for free. So now I control and own my own content, but have to pay. So I have now gone from worries about squalls to worries about File Transfers Protocols. And of course I worry about bread trays to.

So keep a sharp eye. One issue that I'm not sure I will be able to over come is, when I make the shift I may loose my followers as the RSS Feed may be broken. If you are a follower via RSS Feed, I may ask for you to re-sign up for the feed. That's it from a chilly Naples Florida.

Capt Chris