You try to tell newbs and naysayers about Cher one day and then 24 years of your life go by! It’s not okay. (It’s totally okay and I would do it all again.)
Our flagship site, Cherscholar.com, started in 1999 in my Yonkers apartment off Odell Avenue and it all began as a static spoof site. And look at us now! The spoof has swallowed us all up and we are now in our second content management system.
My friend Julie encouraged me in 2006 to start a blog to go along with Cherscholar. At first I had no idea how to strike a balance between a personal blog and Cher discussions. But after some practice on another fan forum, I figured it out and started this intrepid little blog back on September 28, 2006. Unfortunately, back then I did not imagine the blog would last 16+ years or that I would have to lift it up and move it somewhere else. I would say that is something I probably should have known, web content being my day-job and all; but in my defense, content management systems were new back then and the perishability of services just seemed so…far away and unlikely.
And the really bad news is that I didn’t purchase a separate domain name for the blog. I’m fixing that now by attaching the blog to the parental cherscholar.com domain, but….big sigh….16+ years of incoming blog posts links to cherscholar.typepad.com/i_found_some_blog are about to break. Considering the prospect of almost losing 16+ years of deep Cher ponderings, I guess that’s a fair price.
I found out last October that Typepad was no longer accepting new bloggers, which translates to a ramped-down customer service and troubleshooting situation (you can’t pay folks when income’s not coming in). Then, when a server move resulted in weeks of broken site images and downtime, I saw the writing on the wall. But I was loathe to leave Typepad. I have very few complaints about them if any. They were easy to use and secure and their customer service was always great. Although very limited in site bling, their out-of-the-box features were far more customer-friendly than on WordPress where you have to build pretty much everything from plugins. (Want to include borders around your images? Well, you need a plugin for that. Want to link to Twitter? You’ll need a plugin. Don’t ask. You will need a plugin.) But to WordPress’ credit, there’s a lot more bulk editing you can do site wide, so that’s good.
I had worked with WordPress at the Institute for American Indian Arts and at Central New Mexico Community College so I knew the learning curve with it and although I knew WordPress was the safest bet for future migrations, I still felt very loyal to Typepad and very, very lazy to do anything about the situation.
The timeline of the move looked like this:
- November: feeling sorry for myself, wishful thinking that Typepad would get bought out in the next month by another blogging service.
- December: dragging my feet to do anything and continued wishful thinking, backing up all my sites over Christmas break.
- January: begrudgingly researching my options.
- February: prepping the new environments, moving the two Cher sites, struggling with plugins.
Some of my angst I’m sure was not wanting to spend my private life doing my day job. And I don’t even hate my day job; I just don’t want to do it all the time.
Anyway, the new URL for the Cher Scholar blog, I Found Some Blog is https://cherscholar.com/cherblog/. Please update your bookmarks and forgive all the new brokenness.
Oh and image pop-ups will no longer work. So very sorry. I haven’t found the plugin for that.
Sigh.
Old stuff will look messy for a while (and there’s an issue with old comments.)
But as part of our lookback, I’d like to remind everyone this was the first title of my first legitimate I Found Some Blog post, “I’d Be a Superfan of Albert Goldbarth But There’s No Doll.”
Can I get an amen on that? The Funkos Pops are coming!
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