I used sheets and sheets of paper to track text, image and link migration. So un-Web 2.0.

Where have you been? What’s up with your blog? Um, could we get some new freakin’ posts!?

This is the spirit of comments and emails I have been receiving about this blog, and I can understand why. I have committed a major blogging sin by letting this AfterCapture blog seem to fall into disrepair, allowing you to think — gasp! — that it might have even met an untimely death.

Not good. Not good at all.

Luckily, the Blogosphere is a forgiving place, and the best way to secure forgiveness is to focus on two hallmarks of good blogging: Honestly and Transparency. So here it goes. . .

The reason I have not posted since July 14, 2009 is because this AfterCapture blog (as well as the “static” sites hosted by Rangefinder Publications) has been going through some extreme growing pains. In some ways “growing” and “pain” and “blogging” don’t seem to go together, as blogs are designed to grow, evolving naturally and easily, not requiring any “programming,” or even totally clear thinking about where we are headed when we start out.

This is true. But sometimes — as I have found out — simply blogging can go all wrong. That’s what happened here. In this case, the beauty of blogging went all wrong when an outside, Web 1.0-mentality developer got hold of creating the backend of this blog before I got my hands on the front end. It was a classic case of why we should never, ever try to reinvent the wheel.

Why reivent the wheel, when WordPress is oh so good?

What am I talking about? Simply that something went wrong in communications between the developer, AfterCpature and me, and the said developer insisted on building a blog CMS system from the ground up, even as I insisted that WordPress or Blogger could do a much, much better job with almost no development effort (or spending). The result was an underpowered, overpriced, limited blog platform that we have been frustrated with ever since we launched the blog in June 2008.

The great news is that you are reading a blog post that was generated and is powered by WordPress. And now that we are up and running on WordPress, I will be able to channel more content to you in less time with a better interface. And of course, we now have the blog-given-right ability to continue to evolve into the future — free of migration hassles. Blogging done right here we come!

I’ve mentioned “migration hassles,” and I still haven’t explained the big delay since my last post. Let me put it this way: If reinventing the wheel is ridiculous, it turns out that trying to replace such ridiculous wheels with the regular type can be a real hell. In plain blog talk: Migrating from an unfriendly CMS to a friendly one can be both time consuming, brain-scratching time and require gobs of scrap paper. For his part, Rangefinder’s Demond Jordon has been doing wonders in the ongoing process of reworking AfterCapture and Rangefinder’s numerous sites. For my part, I have been using all that 1.0 paper (how primitive) to track the tedious manual update or content.

It hasn’t been fun, but it’s worth the effort. We are almost completely back up and running — just a few old images to re-upload — and all of us on the AfterCapture team are ready to launch a whole new level of AfterCapture blogging starting November 1.

Tags: Blogger, Blogging, On Blogging, WordPress