You must be wondering why the blog suddenly looks different. I have decided to take a huge step forward by moving the blog from being hosted on wordpress.com to a self hosted blog. This gives me more flexibility and control over the blog. Because blogging on wordpress is free, they limit what you can do with your blog, and I don’t blame them. If you want extra, you pay for your blog to be self hosted, which I have done.
Now that the blog is being self hosted, I can also attach videos, and I am very very excited to commence on another phase of blogging.
There are a lot of benefits for self hosting, I can’t begin to list, so I am very excited to be following in the footsteps of professionals, and this will further enrich the content I put up, plus enhance the experience of you the reader. An example is Plugins. Plugins are not available for bloggers who blog for free. Now, I have Plugins and there are so many things you can do with Plugins. An example is Printing a recipe. It must have been an inconvenience to have to use your device in the kitchen. Now, you can simply print my recipe and pin it up in your kitchen. That way you don’t have to worry about accidental spillages on your device.
One glitch for now is Google indexing. If you Google Dooney’s Kitchen Indomie for example, the link that comes up in search results will give you a 404 cannot be found result. This is due to the fact that Google had indexed the links on the old site. Now that those links have been moved to this self hosted blog, Google will need to re-index. I am in the process of filling a request for re-indexing and I have been told this will take a couple of days. In the meantime, if you are looking for a recipe, simply google dooney’s kitchen, and when you are on the homepage, type in the recipe you are looking for in the search bar and it will take you straight to the page. So, sorry for the inconvenience. Hopefully, by the end of the week, the re-indexing will have been completed.
One teeny tiny annoyance is the fact that the layout of the blog has to change. Unfortunately, the theme I was using, is not available for self hosted blogs. It was quite a rude shock. There may be a way around copying the theme, but I don’t have the technical expertise to do that. I should have listened properly during my software coding classes at Uni. If anyone has the technical expertise to do this, please give me a shout and let’s work together. Honestly, I will be very grateful because I really like that theme. I have spent many hours scouring through available themes, trying to find something that is similar, and for now, what you can see on the blog right now is one of the closest. I am not particularly thrilled about it because the side bar is on the right, and the lettering is not as clear. At this rate, I may have to buy a theme and I have many options. One of the themes I am looking at, I have pasted the link below. Please tell me what you think? As you are the readers of this blog, I have to take your opinion into consideration. You guys are basically my customers and customer service and feedback has been drilled into me through my education and my professional experience. So, is this the kind of layout you will love to see? Paying for it is non refundable, so I must looooooove it before I do. Lol. I will be looking forward to hearing from you.
http://demo.mintthemes.com/switcher/?theme=foodie