Off-topic: a blog redesign update
I recently migrated my blog from Blogger to Squarespace, and overall, I do love me some Squarespace. I have a few other sites running on it and I'm happy in general with the experience. However, migrating from Blogger has not been without its snags, some of which affect you guys , my readers, and cause general usability and design issues, including:
- Internal links in my migrated blog posts failed to map properly, so they are broken. All of 'em. I'll be going through and fixing them (slowly), but just be aware that anything pre-migration (so before Thursday, May 14) might have some broken links.
- Weird image alignment and wrapping. I'm also going back and fixing this, but it's still resulting in odd spacing because that's the only way I can fix the awkward text wrapping without re-uploading every. single. image. on hundreds of blogs posts. No. Not gonna happen. Not anytime soon anyway. So weird spacing it is. The visual designer in me cringes in horror, but the practical side of me says "just move along."
- Comments. I despise Squarespace's built-in comment system. It doesn't allow direct replies to comments and it defaults to newest first. Because it doesn't allow direct replies, the comments migrated from Blogger are seriously out of whack and sometimes I look like I'm responding to myself when I was really responding to someone's comment. So, to fix this, I'm going to install Disqus. However. To do that and not lose all of my comments, I have to download my old Blogger blog, upload it to a newly created Wordpress blog (what?!) and then load it into Disqus and sync everything to Squarespace. For serious. Insane. I wish there was an easier way, but there's not. You hear me, Squarespace? Fix this! Just make your own integrated commenting system a little better and that would be just fine.
---UPDATE/EDIT---
Turns out, Squarespace does allow nested comments/replies and I even had it set to enable that. However, the placement and icon for the reply option was apparently not apparent to me. So if anyone else had the same issue, here's where you reply to someone's comment:
Since I'm not a big fan of Disqus, I decided to just stick with Squarespace's default commenting system, even though I think the reply option placement is a usability problem. Overall, I think the default system is less annoying than Disqus.
---end edit---
So if things are a little wonky around here for the next few months, sorry about that! I'm working on it. I've got things broken out into features and release dates (because UX (user experience) is my day job) and I'm working on the above mentioned things as top priority before I do most of my planned additional content adds or design updates.
If you're thinking of migrating from Blogger to Squarespace, those are some things to consider before you do. Ultimately for me, it made sense because of the direction I'm planning on moving with my blog and I really do love the Squarespace interface and features. But it's not without its painpoints, that's for sure.
And now I'll return you to your regularly scheduled running programming, but first, here's a pretty picture of the pineapple fountain in downtown Charleston as a thank-you for reading this off-topic post:
