For a long while now, I’ve been wanting to move this blog from Blogger (Google) to WordPress hosted on my domain. I already did that for my small, personal blog, and it went fairly smoothly. So I’m not too worried about the actual conversion.

That being said, my first issue was finding a WordPress theme that I liked.  Since I’ve used some manual colors (yellow and aqua spring to mind) in many blog posts, I decided that to save myself from a ton of work of having to hunt all those posts and modify them on a light background theme, I’d need to go with a darker theme.  The 1.0 version of the blog was a dark theme, so that was fine with me.

So, for the past several months, I’ve been trying to find WordPress themes that I thought would be fine. I finally chose one that I liked and purchased a license for it in order to get full support (more on all that when the new blog goes live).  I lot of work has been going on to customize the theme to what I want, but I’m pretty excited by what I’ve done so far. Here’s a first sneak peak of the alpha release on my sandbox.

The text “ASTRONERDBOY” is going to be replaced by an image, which my brother is currently working on creating . The background has Sakura from Naruto, but my brother is working on a new background of similar style, only featuring Junpei-kun from Those Who Hunt Elves. ^_^

As seen in the above two image, I’m shifting from a “full post” front page to a “blurb” front page.  I’m also using a “slider” feature, which will display recent recent posts from certain categories, whatever I’ve chosen (anime, manga, Japan, other). One of the options I’d like to have is to have the slider display the most recent posts regardless of category, but I’ll have to research that.

The actual blog posts will be pretty much what they are in the current 2.0 blog (astronerdboy.blogspot.com).

If you are wondering about the video at the top of the left column, a neat feature that came with the theme is the ability to have featured videos. I’m going to use it and swap out videos from time to time.

Not counting my brother’s work on the image files, I figure I’ve got at least another two weeks of work (or so) before I’ll beta test it to see how that goes. After that, it will be go-live time. ^_^

The only negative about the move is the impact that this will have for those of you using Google Friend Connect.  Google no longer supports it, so I can’t even shift it to the new blog.  Since Google and I have a disagreement on my Google+ page, there’s no Google alternate to replace GFC. I’m not sure what would replace it.