Reorganisation of my blog

I have just completed a number of quite major changes to my blog. This is a part of the reason why I haven't posted much in the last few days, although I've also been quite busy in the real world, too.

The only change which regular visitors may notice is that the information about navigating this site, which used to appear immediately below the 'header banner', has been relocated to a new section under my 'Blog Links' section in the right-hand column, using the link name 'Navigation' (naturally enough - Ed.).

The major changes, however, are unlikely to be noticed, assuming that I have carried them out correctly. What they involve is the way that images and web pages are linked to from this blog. Until now I have hosted some of the web pages and images I link to from the blog within the 'Blogger' host, although a great deal more of such images and some of the web pages linked to have been hosted on my own 'Main Website' (see heading the right-hand column for the link). The change is that all web pages and images linked to which appear in the static blog 'template', are now hosted on my own 'Main Website', unless some of those images are hosted by the providers of various of the services I use, as part of their terms and conditions. Obviously, the links in the various 'blogrolls' I use (nine at present, as it so happens) are also hosted by blogrolling.com and only the link codes are included within my own blog's template.

All of these changes are ones I have been meaning to carry out for some time, specially since I switched hosting of my 'Main Website' earlier this year (I wrote about that here), a change which provided me with a great deal more hosting space, but as they cumulatively involved quite a lot of programming effort I have been 'putting off the day'.

However, what has finally spurred me to action is an email I had from Blogger.com earlier this week. My blog is hosted on the 'blogspot.com' host, but is in fact classified as a 'Blog*Spot Plus' account because of a small payment I made to Blogger.com several years before it was acquired by Google.com and they have very generously maintained the privileges granted to 'Blog*Spot Plus' accounts ever since, one of which was the granting of FTP access for uploading non-blog content, like binary files, as
well as the ability to create subdirectories for my blog, within the Blogspot host. Blogger have now advised that they are soon to 'retire' the Blog*Spot Plus feature from Blogger; I understand that the change is all part of the programming changes involved in launching the new version of Blogger, about which many other bloggers have written in recent weeks, as they have been 'beta testing' the new version.

Apart from the changes I have now made I plan to continue running my blog in more or less the same way for the foreseeable future. I have on a number of occasions considered transferring hosting of the blog completely to my own 'Main Website', which undoubtedly has plenty of available space, but as I have generally always been happy with Blogger I see no real need. Many other bloggers have very negative views about Blogger both as a hosting mechanism and as a a blogging tool. I have been frustrated, too, from time to time with Blogger, specially during down-times, also with the limitations on post categorisation that the system imposes on users, specially compared with some other blogging tools such as MoveableType. However, I have enough experience with other website hosts to know that most have their drawbacks occasionally and I understand that the new version of Blogger, which I have not yet used myself, addresses many of the limitations in the present version. In short, I am sticking with Blogger for now.