Site updates - new domain, lost comments, thank you, and some new shiny stuff

I've been messing with some stuff around the site lately and of course I broke some things, so I figured I'd let you all know what's working and what's not.

First off, if you haven't noticed, I moved from TAGmirror.org to RussGoerend.com. It was something I had been meaning to do for a while and when Matt Townsley sent me a note that there was a 99-cent sale on domain names I had to take advantage of it. TAGmirror.org was set to run out in March, so I figured I could use a couple months of re-directing from TAGmirror.org to RussGoerend.com. Also, to be transparent, going to RussGoerend.com makes it easier to find this place on Google. And really, I'm writing hoping there's an audience for my thoughts. If I didn't want an audience, I wouldn't publish in this space.

With the new domain name came the breaking. As of now, all the comments that were left before early last week are gone. Well, technically, there's still on the Internet somewhere, but they're linked up with the old TAGmirror.org URLs and they haven't been able to be transitioned to the new URLs yet. IntenseDebate, the commenting system I use, has been in contact with me and they're working on a fix. I appreciate all the help they've been so far. I don't know if it would have helped, but my only regret is not letting them know I was going to switch domains. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about the comments yet as I can still access them in my comments history on IntenseDebate. I could take a screenshot of them and just update each blog post with that screenshot, but that seems like a big band-aid. I'm holding out hope that the folks at IntenseDebate get something figured out.

Speaking of comments...wow! It's been (relatively) lively around here lately! Thank you! Seeing the "20" beside the comments on the grading post from the other day is a place of pride for me. Not because of the number, but because of the conversation. My goal from day one was for this to be a place of conversation. I'm glad that people feel comfortable having conversations about the topics I've brought up. Seeing that happen makes me want to keep reflecting and writing. Thank you for continually pushing me.

Last, I installed a new toy tonight. It's shiny and I'm attracted to shiny stuff. I installed a Meebo Bar that hangs out on the bottom of your browser. You can use it to log into Meebo if you want and have your chat contacts there for you to chat. That's not that interesting to me. What is cool are all the sharing options. Grab an image or a video and you'll see the screen change into a sharing zone. Click the "share" button in the bottom left and you'll get some options to share the page. Click the "Twitter" button and you'll see a live feed of all the #Comments4Kids tweets. Click the "random page" button and it should take you to a random entry on my blog. I say should because it looks like it's not quite right at the moment. (I don't even see the "random page" button right now, so I know something's not right.) I'll turn some knobs and kick some pipes and see if I can get everything working the way it should.

That's about it. I just wanted to update you on some of the new stuff around here and especially thank you for putting in as much if not more hard work than I do around this blog.