If you haven’t visited my website in a while, you’ll see I’ve made significant changes. New WordPress theme, new header image, which means a new look.
But the part you can’t see, the back-end architecture in web-speak, is that I have purchased server space from a web hosting company. This provides me more control over my website(s) (yes, I have more than one!), allowing me to avoid advertising I don’t want on my site.
The big change in control comes in that I am no longer forced to deal with WordPress.com’s secondary dashboard, which was annoying me to no end. Everytime I wanted to do a quick edit through my own dashboard, WordPress.com popped up its own “simplified” dashboard that wasn’t simpler for me to use. Why, when a perfectly good dashboard is included with a site, must there be a second one fighting with it? That makes for a lousy user experience. I suspect WordPress.com has the second dashboard in order to increase user stats for its own online property. If we’ve learned nothing from Facebook, it’s that anything offered for “free” to the user, the real winner is the company that is offer this “free” service. In other words, the user is the product.
Speaking of Facebook, since taking my vow in January to get off the site, the only reason I find to go on it is for work-related posts. Now that I no longer use it, I’ve found I have a lot more free time, which has given me time to build a new website, in addition to transferring two sites to my web host.
So, drumroll, please, my new website is called “The Pragmatic Historian.” It’s a focused blog meant to explore the uses of history, unlike this blog, which is a whatever-strikes-my-fancy blog that showcases my creative work. The third site I transferred (if you caught that above) is my husband’s furniture refinishing site, Erik G. Warner Decorative Salvage.
As all blogs are, these are works-in-progress, with some tweaking left to do as I add blog posts.
Have a look around and let me know what you think of the new digs.