Uncategorized

New Look, New URL, Same Old Blog

Nate

Hey gang, I’ve decided to make a few changes that I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I felt like they were big enough to comment on.

First of all, I’ve finally moved away from a WordPress URL and gone with http://findingtruth.info. I would have loved .com or .net, but apparently the title of my blog is pretty catchy. The old one (findingtruth.wordpress.com) will still work, but you’ll be redirected to the .info address.

Secondly, I’ve moved to a new theme. I really liked the old one, but this one caught my eye — feel free to let me know what you think about it.

Finally, based on a friend’s suggestion, I’ve decided to use a static homepage for the site, so new visitors can get an idea of who I am and what the blog is about before they’re dropped in front of my latest post. This means the blog articles will now reside at https://findingtruth.info/blog.

These are definitely the biggest changes I’ve made to the blog since I switched it from a Christian to an atheist perspective. I’ll leave it up to you to decide which change was more impactful. 🙂

Feel free to weigh in on these changes — I’m curious to see how they affect the user experience.

Published by Nate

58 thoughts on “New Look, New URL, Same Old Blog”

  1. Curious — why the felt need to change URL?
    As for me, generic nature scenes don’t do much for blog interest.
    I think a static front page is a bad idea. Instead having an ABOUT page is better.
    Just my humble opinions.

    Like

  2. So, do this is NOT a WordPress blog? Then it shouldn’t suffer from the same WP malfunctions, YAY!

    Does the same HTML still apply? Can I underline now?

    (Shut up, Victoria! No comments from the peanut gallery!)

    Like

  3. Thanks for the feedback!

    @arch — it’s still hosted on WordPress. I’ve thought about moving it to another server, but I’m pretty sure I would lose out on the traffic that I currently get from WordPress. And that’s a bigger deal to me right now. I haven’t tried underline yet, so I don’t know about it…

    @sabio — I just updated the image to something a bit more abstract, but that I also think ties into the idea of “finding truth.” Let me know if you think that’s a bit better. I went with the new URL, mostly so I could lock it down. I’m pretty sure that findingtruth.com and findingtruth.net were both available (maybe even findingtruth.org) when I first started up the blog, and looking back, I wish I had snagged at least one of them. When I saw that .info was available (and at a good price), I decided to pull the trigger.

    Like

  7. @ Nate,
    Yeah, I like that pic better, but I prefer self-designed images — but it is hard with your title, I guess.

    Just curious WHY leave the old URL at all — especially since it is free?

    Like

  8. So what’s the code? If you leave a space between characters (), it should deactivate it so you can pass the info onto others.

    Like

  10. @sabio

    I feel like it gives me options down the road. Not that I have any intentions of leaving WordPress, but just in case…

    Also, I’ve always thought about trying to write an actual book about my deconversion and what I see as the problems in religion (I know those are a dime a dozen, and I hate to even voice this desire since it may never happen), and if I ever get around to that, I’d like to refer to the blog in a standalone URL instead of a WordPress subdomain. Nothing wrong with doing it the other way — just personal preference, I guess.

    Btw, I agree with you about personally designing sites. I actually work as a web developer and do a lot of work using WordPress. But while I’m a good WP developer and can do front-end development work as well as anyone, I’m not a great designer. I’d have a hard time improving on these out-of-the-box themes.

    Liked by 1 person

  17. Ah, nested comments…

    Yeah, it’s a great question, and I know a lot of people like them. I just don’t, to be honest. I like the concept, and I like the way they work on sites like Facebook. But on WordPress, the “reply” button often disappears after a certain number of replies, which causes people to start a new chain somewhere else in the thread. It can get confusing.

    Plus, there’s no way to turn them on for individual posts. And I tried turning them on once here, and my old posts just got all jumbled up. Turns out that some people had been commenting through the WordPress reader or via email, while others had just used the normal form on the page. The result was simply unreadable.

    So, for better or worse, I’ve just decided to stay away from nesting altogether. It can be a little aggravating, but it’s usually not too hard to tell who’s replying to whom. :/

    Liked by 1 person

  21. Maybe it only lets me do it. 😦

    It’s stupid. I think they strip the underline tags to cut down on people thinking that some text is a link when it’s not. But I don’t think that’s a good enough reason to remove the capability altogether. Sucks.

    Like

  22. This is dumb, but if you ever really need something underlined to make the point, let me know, and I’ll edit your comment and add it.

    Sorry, arch

    Like

  25. I think we had this conversation before…so I was mostly kidding. 😉

    My preferences differ, but your gripes are legit; I understand the wonkiness. My personal workaround is to usually reply in the app, or type a custom URL with replytocom if there’s no reply button. But that’s not for everyone, and it doesn’t solve it for everyone. It gives me the best shot at reaching my intended recipient, though.

    Ironically, since I didn’t subscribe to this post, I almost didn’t see your reply to my first comment, except that I went back to post a second.

    OTOH, as you pointed out, even if you were inclined to switch, your history complicates matters.

    So… 😐

    Like

Leave a comment