As you can tell, if you’re here we have a whole new look. Mostly that’s my fault because a) I didn’t think outside the box, and b) I can get lazy. Be patient with me as I tweak this design.

See, when I began this journey of blogging I was in blogger back before Google bought it. I knew nothing, and I am still far from a CSS guru. I had a little blog, but I wanted more. We wanted to make mad money for blogging like Heather Armstrong does (maybe not mad money but she lives on it!) At the time Movable Type seemed like the way to go, but I didn’t have the time to learn MT. When I realized they had their own little powerful (remember this was before you had control over blogger) blog system, I was ready to jump on board. It was $14.95 a month, and we agreed. MT was what Heather and Jon used, so it must be the way to go we thought.

We logged into TypePad and created an account. Bought the domain Nooccar.com and off we went. Donna, who I think is wildly hilarious, slowly fell off the blog wagon as I plugged away. Life happens and I could never blog as much as Heather (but hey I have a day job!). Even when it was that life I wanted to blog about, it didn’t happen as much as I wanted but we keep going. I know people read it because my Mum references things, my mother in law emails us responses, and my friend at work tells me she already knows everything about me. So that was that. I kept going.

Somewhere along the line I also bought www.dcamd.com for work and for my more professional proclivities. I have my own space and learned about something called Word Press. I’d seen it on my cpanel before, but I really didn’t realize what it was all about. I didn’t think much about it until I began hanging out with several techie people who love (read adore beyond word!) Word Press as a blog platform. I quickly flipped my dcamd.com domain into a Word Press blog and learned how to customize it for what I wanted.

As some point down the line my wife was trying to figure out why she was paying $14.95 for TypePad and another $14.95 for my webserver space. Couldn’t I put them together somehow? I was scared to do this, but my friend Alan said it shouldn’t be too hard. I really didn’t want to lose years worth of blogging now. Eventually, I got online with my Host Gator, my hosting service, and asked how I could get a deal on a 2nd domain. They said since I owned whatever level service that I have, that I could add-on a domain for free! They sent me the video tutorial link, and I switched the DNS servers. My wife about had a cow when www.nooccar.com took us nowhere, but I just giggled and told her why. After 24 hours of waiting, the site was propagated and it was time to try to import our TypePad blog. Exporting it from TypePad was pretty simple, and it went to text file with all sorts of formatting. I then installed Word Press and went into the settings. I found the import command, chose my file and clicked “OK!”. After a few minutes everything looked good. I could pull into the pages and all my pictures from Flickr linked correctly, but anything I uploaded directly to my TypePad account obviously wasn’t there. I’ll need to fix them later. Next it was time for a theme. Word Press is cool because there are thousands of free themes all over the web. I knew I wanted a static width, 3 column theme that linked pages across the top (not categories sinc I have so many!). I did pick that had categories across the top and it was terrible for my need! I looked and looked and looked some more until I discovered www.jauhari.net/. He had really nice themes and my idea of design meshed with his. I found this one, and I uploaded it to my server. Now I know it’s not perfect, and I still haven’t done any widget tweaking and didn’t change the graphics yet, but hey, it’s here.

Stop back and check it out.