New Dark Arts Blog and Web Site

I started the Dark Arts Astrophotography blog back in November 2013, about a year after having started with astrophotography. At the time, I knew very little about astrophotography, and even less about blogging.

While searching for a blog site, I came across Blogger. It seemed to be a good choice. It’s owned by Google, ties into my Google, G+ and YouTube accounts. It seemed to make sense. But after a couple of years, I started to realize that I didn’t like Blogger much. It just seemed to clunky, its plugins were a mess at best, and the customization options just weren’t there or left a lot to be desired. Well, unless you want to link to other Google services, that is.

A couple of years ago, I bought the darkartsastro.ca domain name with the intention of eventually setting up a web site. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with it, but I knew I wanted to do something. For the short term, I pointed my domain to my blogger site and left it at that. Later, I set up some forwarding subdomains to redirect to my different social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. That was enough for a while.

Now, I decided to dedicated some hosting space I’ve had for some time that I haven’t really been using and making a web site. Despite being a web developer, I didn’t really want to go through the hassles of building my own, so I decided to install WordPress on my site and use that. And I’ve been busy setting it up for the past couple of days. I migrated my old Blogger posts over to my new WordPress site, added some extra pages, themed it up (at least mostly), set my Google ads back up, and now I’m up and running once again! Some images didn’t get properly carried over from Blogger for a few of my blog posts and I’ll be going back and fixing those in the coming days, but for the most part, the site is now up and running. I’m sure it’ll go through many changes over the next little while as I learn to use WordPress better, but for now, I consider this good enough to go live.

There’s currently a storefront on the site, and I do have it all linked up with my PayPal account to add payments. I’m not sure if I’ll actually use it or not. Now that everything else is set up, I want to experiment with setting up a store front to sell prints of some of my photos. I’m not sure how exactly that will work out, but I’m willing to test it out to see how it works out. Whether or not I’ll stick with it is anyone’s guess.

That’s it for now. I’m looking forward to using this new platform.

Comments