It’s been a week long project but rickyjordan.com now has a new host and all new site design!  Since my Blog was launched in June of 2006 it has been part of the designsmarter.typepad community which is funded by SolidWorks.  The great thing about the whole experience is that even though they are providing the space, no one at SolidWorks has ever once said or done anything to control the content of mine or any of the other Blogs in that community.  It has been a wonderful experience and I personally want to thank them for providing it to me.  I honestly don’t believe you would see as many Blogs on SolidWorks today without their help in starting so many through the designsmarter.typepad Community.  I can’t say for sure if I would have started my Blog without their help and encouragement.

So now you must be asking yourself, “If it is so wonderful, then why are you leaving it?”.  I have some big plans for this site.  Some of which I probably won’t complete for another couple of months.  Some of those plans call for a Blog format that is much more flexible than what Typepad has to offer.  WordPress is by far the most flexible & popular opensource Blogging platform around.  Simply put, it fits in best with some of the things I want to do to this site.  The WordPress software itself is free so all I had to do was select a Host.  I ended up going with Bluehost.com.  The experience has been wonderful thus far.  I have UNLIMITED bandwidth & UNLIMITED data storage!  (Yes you read that correctly.)  Now to be fair I’m sure that one wishing to take advantage of this could exploit it and get a call from the guys at Bluehost.  I’m not going to load up servers with massive amounts of data anytime soon and it provides extra piece of mind for me not to have to worry about bandwidth or space.  Not to be lost in this is the fact that they have 24/7 tech support and a feature packed control panel.  It’s nice to have options!

Anyway, here are a few specifics I want to make sure my readers know.  If all goes according to plan, the Feedburner Feed WILL REMAIN THE SAME.  The feed still has Typepad in the address but I left it there so folks hopefully won’t have to update their RSS readers.  The jury is still out on this…keep your fingers crossed for me!  Also I have gone to painstaking trouble to make sure that almost ALL my URLs from existing posts remain the same.  This took some tedious work in both the WordPress admin panel as well as direct edits to the database.  Only 5 of my 150+ posts have new URLs in the changeover.  I will try to get those URLs forwarded as soon as I can.  I’ve still got a few little things I’ll be updating on the pages but everything for the most part should be pretty complete.  Something new with the new site is a search tool!  (FINALLY!)  In my testing thus far it seems to be really quick!  Try it out for yourself!

Thanks to some of my fellow Bloggers for giving me some greatly needed feedback on WordPress and site design concepts.  Also thanks to Patrick Cook at SolidWorks for helping me transition this site with relative ease.

As I always say, STAY TUNED…there is MUCH MORE TO COME!!

UPDATED 8/1/08: I just updated the site with a new custom header.  A special thanks goes out to Josh Mings of SolidSmack who is the Photoshop master behind the new header.  Great Work Josh!  You’ll have to give me some lessons sometime! 🙂