Do it Now or Have More to Do

Too many hours at the keyboard and I need my coffee companion.

I am moving my blog from this WordPress site because I am growing. My online presence needs to reflect that, and I want to expand in ways that make more sense if I move the blog to a self-hosted domain.

It is not technically challenging to move the content of the blog from a wordpress.com blog to self-hosted blog using wordpress.org. There are many great tutorials out there to walk you through the process. I used this one.

The challenges I have faced are these:

• Choosing a theme. There are so many themes to choose from, even if you only limit yourself to free one.
• Customizing a theme. One of the challenges with the theme I chose for my new blog is my name is too long for the Blog Title space on the template, so I had to modify the size of some of the elements, which required hacking around in the theme editor. I am not a serious programmer, but I have been playing around with code since the late 70s, so this has been fun, but has taken time from my writing.
• I am adding new pages and additional content to the site to reflect the changes in my work.
• Every link in every post that linked to a different post in my blog must be changed to refer to the same post in the new location. This is not necessary, but it will keep the experience of browsing my blog cleaner. Without taking this step, links from old posts to other posts on my blog would take visitors to the wordpress.com site and away from the new site.

I am going through all of my old posts and checking links. This is a time-consuming process. I want to be writing new posts, not editing old ones. But, I know that this is a one time project. Once I have done this, the new site will be ready to become my primary home online.

I will still be making changes to the blog, of course, as circumstances warrant. But, I will never again have to transfer this blog to my own domain.

I have put off this move for over a year. The result is that I have a lot more links to fix and the transfer is taking longer than it would have done when I originally planned to do it.

I could give myself grief for this, but I choose not to. I am merely reminding myself that, as is so often the case, delay created more work.

The only good thing to come out of the delay is that my theme, which I love, was not available a year ago. But, even a year ago, plenty of good themes were available.

Are there projects of yours where delay has created more work? Share in the comments and we can use them as reminders to just get on with the things that need to get done.