An increasing number of Virginia political bloggers are abandoning Blogger (yea!) and heading over here to WordPress for their blog hosting. (For anyone who is looking to change over, be aware that WordPress offers an import function, so you can bring all of your posts over from Blogger. Howver, you cannot import your posts from Blogger Beta. The forums here at WordPress.com seem to have a workaround that some folks have been successful in using.)
What has been funny to me is the themes – or should I say theme – that people are choosing to use. Take a look at South of the James, Virginia Virtucon and Bryan J. Scrafford (plus Skeptical Brotha – not in VA but on my blogroll) – notice anything? 😆
Either we all came to the same conclusion or they copied me 🙂 If it is the former, there is hope that R’s and D’s can find some common ground. But why do I suspect it might be the latter? 😆
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Vivian-you definitely were the final push to take RR to The Press, but I fought off the peer pressure…and grabbed the format closest to my old one on blogger…
I had been debating making the switch for quite some time, because I was growing frustrated with blogger and I had heard such good things about wordpress. Now that I’ve started using word press for my posts relating to Virginia, I’m most definitely glad I did.
As far as the layout, I’m the first to admit that I liked the layout when I had seen bloggers such as Vivian and Conaway using it. Since I’ve been seeing this layout for so long on their blogs, it almost seemed wrong not to go with it. Perhaps it’s my little attempt to be associated with the greats of Virginia’s blogosphere.
Bwana – I noticed that you kept a similar theme, which I think is good for your readers.
Bryan – WP has its quirks, too. Fortunately, I’ve been around here long enough to work out most of them. (Some are theme-dependent, BTW.) So if anybody has questions, feel free to email me.
re: blogger templates – there are plenty of places to find ready made templates for blogger or even WP so there’s no excuse for sticking with the blogger templates unless you really dig the design. That and HTML is crazy eazy.
I can’t make the switch to WP because I find the backend a bit bulky and just haven’t really had the time to sit down and wrap my head around it. That and PHP which I knew but then forgot when I didn’t need to use it anymore. Blogger offers enough bells and whistles for what I do, though if J’s Notes got any more popular or I wanted to make it more than just a junk site for my thoughts I might upgrade just to have the bells and whistles WP provides.
Jason,
Where can one find said templates, I’ve looked, but all I can find are the one that aren’t campatible with blogger beta.
FWIW, WordPress and Movable Type have made it extraordinarily easy to host and manage your own site. Many hosting providers (such as mine, Dreamhost) even have one-click installs for WordPress. It might seem a little overwhelming, at first, but there are huge communities dedicated to making it easier, to say nothing of the three million themes out there for the taking and customizing. If you feel even slightly limited with blogger or the hosted WordPress solutions, give doing it on your own a closer look.
Terry – Beta? Eh… Good question. I’ll look around, but a quick peek shows that a lot of folks really don’t have any clue what to do with it. I haven’t fiddled with Beta enough to know anything offhand…
Another cool feature of blogspot is your feed goes down at least 4x a day. Mine hasn’t posted to leftyblogs all day (about 20 percent of my readers come from leftyblogs). I enjoy days when I can just sit back and watch my sitemeter sit at the same number for hours on end.
I’ll likely be switching to wordpress sometime soon. Hopefully I can figure out how to transfer my archives over to here.
You’ve got a great site. That is partially what inspired our transfer to WordPress, but it was mostly the experience of working with it on the A-Team blog. I didn’t even realize we were using the same theme on account of the different headers, though. I guess there is plenty of common ground — we all have good taste!!! That isn’t a bad place to start from.
Re: the header. All you guys are using one of the stock headers, which is the same thing I did when I first got here. I uploaded my own header the first day it was allowed 😉
And you guys haven’t uploaded avatars, either 😦
A few questions from a blog idiot
How do you keep the spammers from eating you alive? i\’ve seen blogs with nothing but spam postings.
How do you keep some left wing extremist from posting racist or defamatory rhetoric? and if you cant stop them, what are you legally liabel when they do?
can viruses be posted to blogs?
Speaking of spam . . .
Let’s see – normally, my spam filter is quite good. If something gets thru, like this, I usually catch it before anyone sees it. If not, I remove the link. That way, no one goes to the site. And if they ever come back and post garbage like this, I mark them as SPAM, never to be heard from again.