Looking For a New Home

I have to admit (like the lack of posts lately don't make it obvious), I have been sort of neglecting the blog lately. This morning I was lying in bed, watching The Food Network with the BF and somehow we got on the subject of my site traffic. For the first time in literally months I checked my Analytics account.

Without going into too much detail I noticed that traffic to my site has increased...very significantly.

I've been debating with myself for a while now whether or not I should move the blog to another service. The reason being, I would like a little bit more control over the design of the blog. I want it to look a little bit more unique. I am somewhat of a web developer, I can't create really big dynamic sites like Facebook or anything, but I can make little blog sites fairly easily.

I realize that blogger does allow for custom template designs, but their API is a little bit more complicated than I care for. Basically, I'm too lazy to really deal with it.

I have my eye on a few blogging services right now that would be very easy to work with. Although I am checking out a few, I'm pretty sure I know which one I'm going to choose. Once I have the new blog up and running I'll post the new address here IMMEDIATELY.

I will miss Blogger. Although it's a little bit more difficult to customize, it is easy to include fundamental things like a followers cloud or tag cloud and such. I also really like the fact that all of my pictures automatically get saved in my picasa account. I'm all for backing things up in the cloud.

I won't delete this blog. I'll leave it up for as long as Blogger will allow it to exist. I just won't update this one anymore. That does bring up another concern for me, however.

I'm noticing a lot of my favorite blogs are being shut down on Blogger. I want to port this one over before I lose it. I've noticed a few of the other Blogging platforms really don't bother bloggers too much regardless of their content. For some reason Blogger gets a little weird about adult blogs. For that reason, I've shied away from posting anything that even looks remotely professional (that and the fact that I truly do prefer amateur material anyway).

I realize that this is going to be somewhat of a hassle for a lot of guys since you have your profile already set up with Google, and now you'll most likely have to sign up with a new service if you want to follow the blog. You'll also have to add a new bookmark, and I apologize for that. But I promise that the site will be a lot better once I move it.

But don't worry, one thing won't change. The quality of Dads, Silver Dads and Polar Bears will not suffer! My resources are very vast, plus I'm starting to get some user submissions (which I absolutely love).

If you have concerns, or general thoughts let me know what they are in the comments.