A Welcome Message to My New Health Blog

Last Updated on July 30, 2021

Hi,

Good day to everyone. I’ve finally made the move and shifted my blog from goodbyesugar.blogspot.com to this blog. I’ve previously hosted my health blog using Google’s Blogger but now, I’ve acquired my own domain name and paid hosting to host this.

If you have asked me a week ago if I will be migrating my site, the answer will be no.  Heck, I even wrote a post early this month in my lifestyle blog about why I chose to stick to Blogger. What an irony. But after finally being fedup with the limitations (I always felt like as though my wings were being clipped)- I make the impulse decision on Friday to switch.

The main reason for shifting is the limited functionality of Blogger- there are so much of things I want to do with my blog but unable to due to the limitations (I have no programming knowledge) such as font control, alignment, template customization, etc. As much as I’ve tried, the old sit looks amateurish to me even though I’ve spent hours going through online tutorials to try to improve it. The final straw was with the truncated post function which had a bug in it.

All posts that are published prior to this post was originally hosted in my previous blog. As I am aware that Google will blacklist duplicate content, I had no choice but to go in one by one to my blog posts in Blogger to delete the original post and provide a link to redirect the visitor to post hosted here. Goodbyesugar blog had the original content- then with WordPress feature, I imported all the posts (with the time and date of posting intact) into this site. Now, if the site had exactly the same content, the search engine will blacklist the more recent site because it will assume that the content from the previous site was stolen. This is understandable as there are lots of splogs and spam blogs who copied contents from other websites- and search engines are trying to blacklist these sites.  I can’t just delete the old blog due to sentimental reasons and because there are incoming links to the blog.

I hope the layout of this site will be more pleasing to your eyes and you will find it easier to navigate through the site. Yes, the site looks very ‘wordy’ and I will be exploring with changing the themes and adding more plugins and pictures once I complete the cleanup process and get all my posts nicely ‘settled’ here (I had to fix the hard links manually). Do leave me a message if you could think of ways I could improve this site or you have problem viewing the pages (like the alignment is out or something).

It’s been hard work to get this site up and running. Since I am html challenged, and my knowledge of CSS, PHP, DNS, SQL were nil- it’s even tougher. At first, I could not even figure out how to get my site up. Lots of trial and error, and persistence- which I am glad had paid off.   I only have to pay to buy my own domain name (yinteing.com) and web hosting.

You can learn from my mistake: if you want your site to grow, it’s better to do it earlier when the posts are more manageable. The longer it waits, the more painful it will be to migrate because by the time, you will have many posts (hard links) and search engine ranking. No regrets about migrating- I should have done much sooner.

I am now left with the task of cleaning up all the hard coded links that are found in my posts- a task which I expect to be completed within a day or two. Meanwhile, thousand apologies if you find yourself redirected back to my previous site.  I’ve worked so many hours to try get things back to normal so that I can write more- this morning I slept at 3.30am and when I slept, I suddenly felt dizzy (the room was moving). Yes, to many people, this obsession and lack of sleep is insane. But as other bloggers would probably agree, blogging is really a passion- most of the time, we are not only focusing on the content aspect, but we think of our audience and readers. We want them to be more comfortable and we hope our blogs will be user-friendly. So all those hours in front of the PC day and night is worth it 🙂

P/S: Felt a bit drained from the hours spent in front of the PC I managed to pop into the gym today and after an hour and half of cardio, weights and lots of stretching, I felt like new again.  So next time if you are tired from spending hours on a project or in front of the internet, take some time off for a workout- can be a walk around the neigbourhood, some jumping jacks, dancing to your favourite tunes. You will feel fresh after your brain gets its huge dozes of oxygen and improved circulation.

Latest Update: The migration is harder than I thought it would be. I noted that my side bars were out of alignment and realised the bug is caused by an addition function I’ve used in Blogger. Previously, I’ve added a function in my Blogger posts that enable part of the posts to be displayed at the front page (so that the reader need not stroll all the way down). Blogger does not have this function so I had to go through many online tutorials till I found one that worked. Unfortunately, the hack had got a serious bug in it (in fact, it had a serious bug in my Blogger. So I had to manually go in, look at the html text and figure out the code that is causing my sidebar alignment problems. But it is only a one time pain. WordPress had the text excerpt function which really impress me.