Goodbye, blogger! I have officially migrated all five hundred and twenty of our journal entries, and nearly two thousand comments to our own server. This journal is now stored in our database, and displayed with my new, written-from-scratch publishing platform.

If I did my job right, the changeover was mostly imperceptible. Everything should look exactly the same as it did before, with a few notable exceptions:

Table of Contents for Topics

All of our entries for each topic (or country) are now available on a single page, accessible by clicking the links in our sidebar, or the ones found at the bottom of each post.

Additionally, choosing an entry from the table of contents forces the next/previous links at the bottom of our journal to jump to the next (or previous) entry in that topic.

Commenting System

Blogger's commenting interface is terrible. Our new system is, hopefully, straightforward and simple. No popup windows, no confusing array of accounts to log into. Just type what you want to say and post it.

In a few days, it will be possible to request an email alerts when new comments are posted. For those who don't like email, RSS feeds for comments are coming too.

Behind the Scenes

Most of the big changes are behind the scenes. Because we have so much going on, and so much writing to do, I am always looking for ways to speed up everything in our workflow that isn't actually writing. We now have seamless integration with flickr; our photos and the sets they belong to automatically stream into our entries. Another handy feature of having our journal in our own database: the stats for each of our days are automatically tied to it.

We have all kinds of information to share, I just haven't written to code to expose it yet.

One step at a time.

Feedback

On the off chance something doesn't seem to be working, or doesn't intuitively make sense, please shoot me an email with our contact page to tell me about it. I will look into it as soon as I have a free second!