The End of the Blogolympics ~ LA PENSINE MUTINE (EN)

As Mark Twain would say, I didn't know it was impossible so I did it! It thus took me a whole month, copy-pasting the HTML code of my Eklablog posts onto Blogger all day long. The Labours of Ey@el — an altogether “blogolympic” sport to use the words of fellow Eklablogger Stormalo, which brought me no medal, but the great satisfaction of achieving my goal and working my way out of the hijacking of my content by Webedia.

What is gone

This relocation offered me the opportunity to do a major clear-out and thus alleviate my workload by removing all posts with no added value (with some exceptions), namely reposts featuring no editorial or additional details from me.

Also abandoned are quotes of the day, tube downloads, and cross-references since moving to another platform created broken links and it would have been unduly burdensome, once published, to edit all posts individually (705 to date) in order to fix that.

And of course, comments but I managed to recreate my original guestbook (using entries from Eklablog) where you may leave comments and suggestions about the blog.

Last but not least, the newsletter subscription, which would allow you to receive automatic email notifications every time I posted something, is no longer available on Blogger. However, you may subscribe to my post feed instead and set your feed reader to notify you in real time.

What remains

As you can scene, the theme and layout are pretty similar to the old platform.

The Homepage still displays all posts starting from the most recent, the only difference being that cover pictures are reduced to thumbnails featuring the first few text lines thus offering a more compact view and preview of post content. And we went from 30 to 7 displayed posts per page for smoother browsing.

Just like on the old platform, you may still access categories using the top horizontal drop-down menu now featuring convenient sub menu entries to explore the topics you are interested in.

The Recent Posts widget does not simply provide a list of post titles, it also features the first lines of text. As for the Archives widget, it is definitely more convenient and operational. If you click on a year, you may browse through all articles starting from the most recent from this chosen year on and access older articles beyond. Same if you click on a month within a year. Otherwise, blog entries are listed within month folders, allowing you to directly access a chosen post.

What has changed

Categories have become labels, a tag system allowing a single post to have several categories thus refining your search. There was a similar system on Eklablog but it was dysfunctional and totally unreliable.

To browse though categories you may click on any label displayed under post titles; you may also use the top horizontal drop-down menu; or you may use the Categories tab on the right side panel where all labels are listed in descending order according to the number of posts per category.

The Related Articles I used to create manually at the end of articles are now automatically generated by a script based upon labels and display an additional thumbnail for better visual identification.

All post pictures may be displayed full size as a slideshow if you click on any of them. You may scroll with the mouse to view other pictures instead of opening and closing each picture to view it full size.

Finally, all missing pictures and deleted videos have been replaced. There may still be dead link pointing to deleted pages from external websites and unfortunately I cannot fix that. A possible solution would be to check whether these pages are available on the Wayback Machine.

What is new

A footer panel featuring all the information and links pertaining to the blog.

A widget in the right side panel to pin any post which I'm going to use to feature old articles you might want to read or re-read. Another good reason to visit regularly.

Last but not least, a responsive design adapting to any size of screen or device. If you're browsing with your smartphone, DO NOT select Mobile Version as the Desktop Version is designed to adapt to your screen featuring all the navigation options previously unavailable for mobile devices on Eklablog. Thus the top menu will display as a single drop-down select menu while the side panel will be fit under main page, just above the footer panel.

Best of all: no more ads!!!

Thank you so much for your patience and diligence. Given the circumstances, you will easily understand that I had absolutely no time to write or translate any article and need to take a short break. But worry not, I'll get back to it very soon for it's still important to me.

To a valiant heart, nothing is impossible!