After a lot more effort than I expected, I’m pleased to unveil version 2.0 of All That Is Necessary. For those who care about such details, I’ve migrated my original Blogger blog to the WordPress platform, hosted on my personal domain, kirkpetersen.net.
(I’m .net because kirkpetersen.com, no relation, had already been snapped up by a software engineer in Seattle. Other unrelated Kirk Petersens of note include Austin real estate agent Kirk S. Petersen — hey, that’s my initial, too! — and Kirk P. Petersen, an attorney and estate planner in Eldorado Springs, CO, who based on his Amazon book reviews clearly has more intellectual tastes in his reading than I do. There’s also Dr. Kirk Petersen, a dentist in southern California; Kirk Petersen, a real estate appraiser in Harlan, IA, a few miles from where both my parents grew up; and interior designer Kirk Petersen of Olympia, WA. I wonder if he knows his techie namesake in nearby Seattle?)
And here I thought I had a distinctive name. But I digress.
There are two main reasons for changing the blog. First, WordPress is pretty widely acknowledged to be the best and most versatile blogging platform, far more flexible and robust than Blogger. I knew this before I started blogging, and initially tried to set up on WP, but ran into some technical problems that I couldn’t figure out how to solve. (The company’s promise of the “famous five-minute WordPress installation” is more than just an exaggeration, it’s a falsehood.) I decided to launch on the much simpler Blogger platform with Blogspot hosting, rather than fight my way through the technical thicket, because I wasn’t completely sure I would even enjoy blogging. Turns out I do.
Second, I decided to integrate my blog with my marketing site, after initially being leery of doing so. The leeriness came from the fact that I stake out some fairly pointed political views here, and I don’t want to alienate any potential clients and employers. I finally reconciled myself to the fact that if you Google my name, the second and third results currently are my marketing site and my blogspot blog, respectively (curse you, top-ranking kirkpetersen.com techie guy!) Since it’s not really possible to segregate my two online identities completely, I may as well get whatever benefit I can out of integrating them.
They’re not truly integrated yet, as you can see at a glance from the very different look of the marketing site. That site was lovingly hand-coded by the Web Goddess, and it continues to serve me well. Interestingly, even though the blog gets more than 50 times as many visitors as the marketing site, the latter ranks above the former, both in the Google search results and in Google’s mysterious PageRank rankings (blog = PR1, marketing site = PR2).
Now that I finally have this launched, maybe I can get back to writing more actual substantive blog posts. The next phase of the integration will be to pull the marketing content into the WordPress structure, so I can more easily maintain it myself, and to unify the look-and-feel with some nice design touches by the Web Goddess. (In the meantime, if I can help your company or organization meet your communications needs…)
Sign up for the RSS feed or email delivery if you want to make sure you never miss a post (hi Mom!). If you signed up for RSS at the old site, it should get forwarded automatically for a couple of weeks, but I think eventually you’ll need to sign up again here. Thanks for visiting — hope to see you back soon.
So, what do you think of the new site? Find anything broken?