You may have noticed thekriegers.org has a spiffy new website. Well, maybe I shouldn’t use the word spiffy quite yet. This is actually sort of the rough draft. Let me explain.

Ever since we started this blog I’ve wanted to use WordPress as our platform, but we stuck with Tumblr for various reasons and I only mentioned it to my IT Department two or three times a day.

This year, as part of my Christmas present, Tom migrated my content from Tumblr to WordPress. People switch blogging platforms all the time (Tom tells me they’re more accurately called “Content Management Systems”) and the whole process is pretty straightforward. That is, if you do it the way most people do it. But my husband is a man who values a little thing called data integrity.

From what I can tell, if you migrate your content the normal way, you lose a lot along the way. To maintain things like our URL, internal and external links, tags, and to move our comments from Disqus to WordPress took hours of frustration, emailing tech-savvy friends, Googling, and general anxiety. Moving comments over was the hardest, most time-consuming step. Based on Tom’s research, no one in history has ever moved comments from Disqus to WordPress and lived to tell about it. Tom finally figured it out, he even learned a new programming language in the process

That’s why it was a Christmas present and not just how Tom spent an afternoon. This took hours and hours. And I’m not exaggerating. Pat the guy on the back next time you see him.

The reason I hesitate to use the word “spiffy” is because the design and overall look of the site is my department. Since Living on Grace isn’t a fulltime gig for either of us, a few days would sometimes pass between when Tom would have the WordPress site ready and I’d finally get around to looking at things themes and fonts. Meanwhile, the editorial department (which I also head up) would have posted more content, meaning Tom would have more photos to resize, links to fix, and comments to move over.

This happened several times.

So last Friday, instead of watching Shark Tank like we normally do, we decided to throw caution to the wind and go out. We got a babysitter, headed to a coffee shop, ordered a milkshake, and Tom worked for two and a half hours updating the site while I sat beside him and played Angry Birds on his iPhone.

Tom had his head buried in his laptop while I tapped and swiped furiously on his phone. Several people stopped to tell us how romantic and in love we looked.

As soon as he finished, we chose the first WordPress theme we sort of liked. What you see here is the result of our romantic computer date.

The banner is the wrong size, we don’t like the fonts or the sidebars or the colors, but look! We did it! Spending his Friday night working was worth it. Plus, I had a chance to replay several levels and get three stars.

It would have been nice to have the site finished and polished before posting, like lots of the big fancy blogs we follow, but we couldn’t get IT and creative to synch schedules. For now, check our our new digs! We’ll fix the rest somewhere along the way.

We’ve heard a lot of people have had some trouble accessing the site or can only load it after a few refreshes. It doesn’t load well for my sister in Taiwan, and whenever my mom has trouble, she thinks I’ve taken down the site and has a panic attack. We hope the changeover solves those problems.

Make sure to update your RSS or any other links. Everything should still work (if you’ve linked or subscribed to thekriegers.org rather than our Tumblr URL) but it’s worth double-checking. [Tom also wants to note that if you happen to have a link to an individual post, it  won’t work anymore. Apologies. However, I checked a few Pinterest pins and they actually did work. I’m not sure why or how, but I’m giving Tom credit.]

If you have any other problems, feel free to contact our IT department.

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