No, Chester didn’t grow 3 feet. No, Gretel didn’t bulk up to 50 lbs. YouDidWhatWithYourWeiner.com is experiencing a growth spurt.
In about 2 months our little blog will be one year old. I can hardly believe it was just yesterday that we took Gretel on her first hike (in the snow no less) and I said, “Ya know, I think I am going to start that blog I have been thinking about.”
This blog has grown so much over these last 10 months. Our horizons have broadened and our world has expanded. We have connected with more people than we imagined and made some good friends along the way.
I want to make some changes to celebrate our first year and the first change is happening Wednesday. It is our big growth spurt if you will. We are making the move from WordPress.com to the self-hosted WordPress.org so we have more control over our blog.
With the new freedom, I am sure we will also experience some hiccups. While the site is being migrated over Wednesday, I can’t put up any posts, comment or make any changes.
You won’t see Chester and Gretel for Wordless Wednesday this week. However, we WILL be back Friday with another great review if all goes well.
We appreciate your patience during this time and we will see you again at the end of the week.
nancy says
October 3, 2011 at 8:06 PMJess,
we love your stories and adventures and hearing about Chester, Gretel and their occasional houseguests. That being said, we’ll work through the bugs, so, Go for the Growth baby!
Nancy, and Gigi-the-long-haired-dauchsund, o,r as Netflix knows her; Gigi, Destroyer of Worlds!
AdventureJess says
October 3, 2011 at 8:26 PMThanks Nancy!
Mary Hone says
October 4, 2011 at 8:21 AMCongrats on one year. Speaking from my personal experience, the first year is a huge learning experience. We are getting close to a year. You will love wordpress.org. Keep rockin’ the weiners!
(the dogs that is) Hehe
AdventureJess says
October 4, 2011 at 9:30 AMThanks. I am a little afraid I won’t know how to use it but I guess it is not that different. I might move to the Headway Theme too. Any experience with that?
Carly says
October 4, 2011 at 11:51 AMHappy Anniversary! Good luck with your move on WordPress. It’s great – so many more features and control!
AdventureJess says
October 4, 2011 at 12:31 PMIt’s too many features I am afraid of. Ha, ha. I am sure it will be fine….just a little anxious 🙂
Julie says
October 4, 2011 at 3:13 PMGood luck!! If you have any problems, send an email . . I’ve done plenty of WordPress installs 🙂
AdventureJess says
October 4, 2011 at 3:25 PMThanks!
Kas says
October 4, 2011 at 5:25 PMCongrats on 1 year! We love you guys 🙂
AdventureJess says
October 4, 2011 at 7:17 PMThanks!! Sorry, we haven’t been by as much as we’de like. We hope to visit more this winter 🙂
Elizabeth says
October 4, 2011 at 6:40 PMWe wish you good luck!!! And congrats on the one year. Let us know how you like WordPress.org.
snoopy says
October 5, 2011 at 6:01 AMHappy 1year !!
Good luck on your big move today guys!!
Your pal Snoopy 🙂
Bruce Sherman says
October 7, 2011 at 8:23 AMJess, the link in your mail this morning for this blog entry got a 404 warning. I went back to the home page and found it, but you might want to check on the problem.
Home again?
AdventureJess says
October 12, 2011 at 8:22 AMThanks. Good to know. It is a glitch between the posts scheduled on the old blog (which I can’t access anymore) and they new blog. You are getting a page error because the blog thinks the posts have published and is directing you to the new blog to find them but they are not there because they haven’t actually published yet. Both the WW and Cozy Hound Review Posts are scheduled to post later next week. Thanks for your patience. This shouldn’t happen again.
Elizabeth says
October 12, 2011 at 7:05 AMJust a heads up that your WW for today is loading a page error. 🙁
The new blog format looks great! It’s clear you’ve worked very hard on it.
AdventureJess says
October 12, 2011 at 8:22 AMThanks. Good to know. It is a glitch between the posts scheduled on the old blog (which I can’t access anymore) and they new blog. You are getting a page error because the blog thinks the posts have published and is directing you to the new blog to find them but they are not there because they haven’t actually published yet. Both the WW and Cozy Hound Review Posts are scheduled to post later next week. Thanks for your patience. This shouldn’t happen again.
And Thanks about the new blog format. I have some way cooler changes coming but I have to resolve the slow image load first. Unfortunately, that looks like it will take me about a month or so. My overall plan was to have all the reformatting done by our first anneversary next month so I guess I am still on track with that 🙂
Free Pet Advice says
October 12, 2011 at 12:05 PMLars and I just came across your blog and have bookmarked you. Nice work so far!
AdventureJess says
October 12, 2011 at 12:16 PMThanks so much! Also, thank you for taking the time to comment.
We recently made some changes that have resulted in our images loading slowly plus a few other minor glitches. We appreciate you bearing with us during this transition period. We expect that the site will be fully functioning again within the next month. We took a temporary hiatus in posting to make the changes but we will resume our regular posts again next week.
Kari says
October 13, 2011 at 5:20 AMHi we are a new follower!
I did the same thing – when I moved over to WP and imported my blogger post all my pictures are messed up… I have over 250 post with pics to fix so I at some point hope to go back and fix them 🙂
Are you doing self hosted wp? If so there are plug ins you can download to help your site load faster 🙂
AdventureJess says
October 13, 2011 at 5:37 AMWelcome Kari! We are glad you found us.
As far as I can (what I see on my end) is that the only thing loading slowly on the blog is the images. Text and widgets and everything seem to show up right away. Please let me know if that is not the case for you.
As far as fixing the images, the only way to do it right is to change each and every one of the image files to one of smaller size. You can use a plugin called Smoosh It for WP that will “smash” your photos into a smaller size but I was fining that because my original files were of different sizes, the Smooshed images were also of differing sizes. Also, in some cases, the original file was too large to Smoosh. Lastly, this “smoosh” is a temporary band aid. If you disable the plugin the photos go back to their regular size. I wanted a permanent fix to my problem and I wanted to make all the images the same dimensions so the posts were more aesthetically pleasing (and to satisfy my perfectionist tendencies. Ha, ha). I started swapping out the images last night. I use Photoshop to make the images smaller. It will take me a long time but once I got the process down it went much faster than I thought.
For a generally faster loading site you can use a cache-ing program such as WP Supercache.
With the problem fixed we can start posting again! Yay!