Hey there,
Well, it's about that time again. It's time for another Geek-Tastic site update. We are now on version 3.0 of the site. For those of you who recall, version 2.0 involved the site jumping from being hosted privately by my good friend Josh Lander to being hosted by the online community called Squarespace.
The move to Squarespace was good at the time because it offered a number of things that private hosting through Josh couldn't. First and foremost, it freed up my poor Josh from having to work on the site all the time for no pay. Thanks for all of that work Josh. I really do appreciate everything you've done for the site. :)
The move also allowed me to take more control of the look of the site. Squarespace is great with some of their templates and tools to design things. The site suddenly looked a bit more professional, and I was also able to have more direct access to site controls and was better able to monitor site usage. However, there were a number of things about the move that I didn't like.
The biggest detractor to Squarespace was the price. It cost $100 to sign up for one year, and that yearly price just jumped up to $150 a year. I'll be honest here, I like having this site, but it's really just meant to be a creative outlet and hobby where I share cool news that I find and try to stretch my writing muscles a bit. I can't really afford to spend $150 a year to keep the site going (that's not even counting URL registry fees and the cost of a Flickr pro account) on a site that I haven't really been posting to regularly anyways for the past year. I needed to find an alternative, and preferably a free one if I could.
I had used Google's Blogger site before, but this was years ago and I didn't care for it at the time. It seemed too restricted for what I wanted. Recently though, my friend Robert Magness asked me to design a new site for the Matt and Wes vs. The Zombie Apocalypse web series using the Blogger tools and that experience was a bit of a revelation for me. I'll freely admit that I'm not the most tech savvy guy in the world, but even I was able to hop into Blogger's tools and figure out how to make a decent looking site in only an hour or two.
I was so happy with this experience, I decided right then and there to move Geek-tastic over to blogger. The options it now offers are exactly what I wanted. It's easy to use and set up, I was able to import over all of my other content from Squarespace, and best of all . . . it's free.
As an added bonus, I am able once again to set up contributor accounts for others who write things for the site. This was something that Squarespace didn't offer unless I wanted to shell out even more money. You have no idea how happy this makes me. I felt really bad when suddenly I was the only person who could access the site once I moved from Josh's hosting to Squarespace. Thankfully, that isn't a problem any more.
There are some small downsides to moving to Blogger though, but they're minor. First, all of the pictures that were hosted on my previous Squarespace site will be lost once that site gets shut down in a month or two. To combat this, I've updated the last year or so worth of posts so that the images in the articles are hosted elsewhere. That means that if you go looking through the site's archives, you will probably notice that a little over a year out, a lot of posts will be missing photos. I'm sorry about that, but there's just too many posts to update (0ver 1,300) and I couldn't get to them all. Besides, most people aren't going to be looking up a lot of dated news from over a year ago anyways. Hopefully, you'll forgive me for some bad, older posts.
Also, I can't seem to figure out how to make the Web Comic button in the main navigation bar become a link that takes you directly to the separate Geek-Tastic Web Comic site. The best I can do for now is to provide a link on that page to the Web Comic site. I apologize for the requirement of a second click-through. If anyone knows how I can fix that, please by all means feel free to let me know in the comments, or email me at geek.tastic@yahoo.com.
Ok, enough rambling on my part. I hope you like the new layout of the site. I've made some changes to the navigation bar on the right, as you can see. I will most likely continue to make tweaks and fixes to the format going forward too. Let me know what you guys think of it.
And now, back to your regularly scheduled Nerd Blog.
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