Month: February 2007

Flirting with WordPress

Miriam4 Comments

 Over the past couple of days I’ve been dipping my toe in the water of other blogging platforms. The first thing I’ve discovered is that there is no perfect blogging platform. Typepad charges for membership, blogger has an annoying comments system and no inbuilt stats and WordPress.com won’t let you fiddle with the CSS without paying for the privilege. I like the idea of WordPress.org but I can’t justify paying for a server for my blog. All the other options seem a bit more ‘journal’ like and are filled with ‘Hi, I’m Catie and I’m bored…’ blogs… Not really the style of blogging I want to associate myself with.

I set up a WordPress.com account and imported my blog and comments and I’m rather pleased with the result. Importing was easy, the only problems in translation were disappearing youtube videos (wordpress doesn’t accept javascript) and borked up web addresses associated with comments. Both problems were relatively simple to fix however the more obsessive compulsive types could spend a good couple of hours perfecting everything. All of the labels/tags/categories transferred across nicely too.

My main concerns with changing over are confusing readers and losing my google pagerank. At the moment I’m the first hit for ‘Miriam Parkinson’ but it took a good couple of months to get there and I don’t have a whole lot of regular readers so I need to keep every one I have 🙂

If I do change platforms I think the best plan of attack is to cross post for a while, start using my wordpress address when commenting on blogs and wait for my wordpress blog to creep up the google charts until its somewhere respectable and I can switch this one off.

Please hit me (not literally) with any advice you might have. Critiques of the new blog, pros and cons of wordpress I might not have noticed yet etc.

Imported from my old blog

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That didn’t take long (aka polyphasic sleep failure)

MiriamLeave a comment

Last night after skipping one nap and then oversleeping on the next I was a wreak. Not just physically but emotionally too. I ended up crying through my shower (to wake myself up) and in the end decided to just go back to bed. Colin, upon finding me in bed crying softly, made a couple of attempts at motivating me to keep going but in the end just let me sleep.

I don’t regret stopping, nor do I regret trying it out. I’ve learned a few things about myself and I’ve also seen how this could work. I probably could have kept going for a bit if I hadn’t skipped a nap but I think even with adaption I ultimately would have stopped fairly quickly anyway.

The reason for this is loneliness. I am a very social person and I really couldn’t handle not being able to cuddle in bed before I went to sleep, and cuddle again when I wake up. I’m also fairly panicky and afraid of the dark so noises in the night freaked me out when I didn’t have Colin to cling to. Another massive problem with this method is that a simple thing like dinner and a movie doesn’t work if you need to sleep every 4 hours. Its like having a baby with you, except that you’re the baby.

If you have too much happening in your day to handle and want some spare time, and if you’re not a particularly social animal (or you can at least handle being alone at night) then this method could work for you. But if you’re life isn’t very flexible or you just want to try this out for the fun of it then its just not worth the effort.

In the end I’m confident that you can get a 22hr day, but you need to weigh up whether it’s really worth it.

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