It’s been a quiet month on the blog. After the craziness involved in planning the wedding, we spent the first part of April recovering from all the stress and getting caught up on all our work. Now, we’ve spend the latter part of the month getting ready to go away again - this time on our honeymoon.

So, the blog will be quiet for the month of May. We hope to return to regular posting of a good quality upon our return.

We’ll be spending our honeymoon backpacking through Europe. Should prove relaxing and reinvigorating.

For an account of our trip, stay tuned to regular posts on Blogaholics.

Step 2 of the migration. Blogaholics followed on the heels of the Vancouver Coffee migration and is now on WordPress. What a sigh of relief!

Now the thousands of daily spam hits can be managed more effectively!

The panicked blogging has officially begun. As part of my honeymoon preparations, I am organizing all my blogs for my absence. For the month, the following strategies will be played out on various blogs:

• No posts - mostly my personal blogs
• Posts from abroad - Blogaholics will have some travel diary features, when we have time
• Guest bloggers - all 4 of my entertainment blogs will be taken over by a guest blogger since they require daily attention to the news
• Pre-posting - I am preposting from today until June 1 for 3 blogs - those on which I have a considerable reputation I’d like to keep to myself, or for which I have a contract that should be continued

Today I started and finished preposting for my favorite blog, Cooking Gadgets. It’s a fairly easy blog to write, since I am passionate about gadgety goodness, but sourcing that many days’ worth of material did take time. That said, I actually posted 46 posts today on that single blog. Took about 5 hours.

Tomorrow, I move to start and finish She Knows Best - there will not be as many posts on that one, but they require considerably more time per post to research and write.

The blogosphere has swelled to 35.3 Million blogs. Impressive. 

We’ve begun the migration of our blogs to WordPress. When we started all our blogs, we put them on different platforms to ensure we knew them all. Now, we’re past that. It’s time to get serious.

BloggingHelp was our original WordPress blog. After we had 2 on Movable Type and one Drupal, we decided to stick with WordPress for all new installs. Faster. Cleaner. Easier to maintain.

Today we started the migration of blogs to entirely WordPress powered. The first to move was Vancouver Coffee. Next will be Blogaholics. And lastly Baking Low Fat, which is on Drupal.

Why do we choose WordPress?

• The installs are fast and clean
• Upgrading is simple
• Plugins. Oh, we love them.
• Widgets. A la Blogware, but better.
• Easy to add pages, links, etc.
• SPAM!!

We just couldn’t handle the volume of incoming comment and trackback spam. The comment spam was at such a high rate that we had to delete it every day… too much was getting through, and too much was being held for moderation. And those we deleted often were stll visible, which was annoying.

So, now we’re all happy. After the migration is complete we’ll be able to take our honeymoon without needing to monitor the blog spam levels like crazy people.

Tags: wordpress

Today we have a big announcement for Qumana. No, it’s not another new version (although we upgraded a bit too). It’s far larger.

Qumana is now to be distributed by Lycos as Lycos-Qumana.

From our press release:

Lycos, Inc. (http://www.lycos.com), a leading media destination for creators and consumers of quality content, today announced a new desktop blog editing tool, powered by Qumana, making blogging easier and more profitable for bloggers everywhere.

With the new Lycos-Qumana Desktop Blog Editor (http://lycos.qumana.com), Lycos enhances the freedom of blogging, allowing users to publish to their Tripod and Angelfire Blogs on Lycos, as well as to other major blogging sites, from the desktop. Additionally, the Lycos-Qumana Desktop Blog Editor works with Qumana’s Q Ads, an integrated ad program, allowing bloggers to insert ads into their blogs, while revenue from these ads is shared with the bloggers.

This deal is big news for both Lycos and for Qumana. For Lycos, it’s the first big move into Web 2.0 - by enhancing their own blog offering with Angelfire and Tripod, and topping that up with added services from Qumana, Q Reader and Q Ads, they have officially launched themselves into the Web 2.0 realm. With a splash. For Qumana, it means access to a few million potential customers - some who are already blogging up a storm.

We have really enjoyed working with Lycos so far. The Lycos team is energetic and with big thoughts for the future. It’s been a spur for us to move faster than we already were, and to continue making all three of our services even better. We’ve all had to huddle down and work like mad - a feat for us all, especially with the wedding - and we’re enthusiastic ecstatic about the news going public today.

So, if you haven’t already checked out Qumana, you should. And if you need help, it’ll likely be the "Blogaholics" giving you a hand ;)

Tags: qumana, lycos