Just moved the site over from WordPress to b2evolution. People have asked me why, a few times. There are a few reasons. But, for now I am fixing glitches with moving to another CMS. I like b2 and I don't think it will take me long to get to know how it works and where things are now. Meanwhile, images are mostly not working. Categories and tags did not make the import, not sure why. So I am manually going through my posts one by one to renovate a little. What usually happens when you move to a new place... you renovate to make it look more like the old place. :) People are funny like that.

Making my life easier, I have added comments from the original post to this post. I have been moving my site content to Joomla. It's a different set up from WordPress and b2evolution but I think it will be more active and user friendly.  Still need to fix the images with posts (that was mangled by WordPress) and add my links which I will end up doing manually, one at a time. But, I hope this will end the project of moving from WordPress to some other CMS. It has been a longer adventure than I expected.

Here are the comments:

Comment from: Jane Gassner [Visitor]

I lost the entire archive of MidLifeBloggers.com and JaneGassner.com sometime during the holiday season. It was one of those, "you only have 24 hours to migrate" and for various reasons, I got in at the 25th hour. I couldn't decide how upset I should/would be. MidLifeBloggers was a longterm venture that still got a lot of hits. JaneGassner.com, not so much. But MidLifeBloggers was old business, and I had said everything I wanted to about midlife and beyond. Jane Gassner had the potential to be new and, if not shiny, then gaining a slight glow about it after time. So I'm redoing JaneGassner.com but starting anew. It's springtime, and perhaps that's influencing me to not try to make it as it was. Considering that it wasn't that successful, it's probably a wise decision.

03/28/17 @ 09:27 pm

Comment from: laura [Member]

I really like history so that part of it would be hard for me. But, I have thought about just starting fresh too. Moving a site is never completely smooth and simple but I've been trying to move old content and have not made time to write new posts. That is kind of backwards. Starting fresh might have been better than trying to preserve old content (that mostly only matters to me).

03/29/17 @ 12:18 pm

Comment from: laura [Member]

I like your new site. Writing something for writers has it's own challenge. It makes me doubt myself and compare myself with others too much. I thought about closing this site. But, I do like writing it. So... here it still is.

You have doubled images in posts with WordPress featured image. I kept having that problem too.

I applied for the Paranormal topic at About.com today. But, I tried 3 times over the afternoon, the site keeps giving me a 404 error when I send the application. So, for personal posterity, here is what I sent.

*Time travel, mad science, aliens, cryptozoology, the supernatural, lost worlds, the unexplained, weird science, history, and magic absorb me. I would enjoy exploring and writing more about these topics and others for About.com. Of course, it isn't possible to write about anything without burying yourself in it and exploring your way out again, eventually. Getting lost is part of the adventure and with anything paranormal getting lost is expected. We don't have all the answers, if we did it would all just be science.

I am an urban explorer, photographer, history geek, Pagan, artist and I've just joined the local archivist group in Barrie, Ontario.

I love history and old places. I've been interested in the paranormal since I was a kid but I've grown to be skeptical about a lot of it. I do believe there are mysteries and unexplained things we just are not able to understand with our current knowledge. I like theories and I will read about pretty strange, unexplained and unusual stuff but I like to make sense of it in some way. I also like reading theories I don't agree with because we need to hear from both sides and, often, you can find something that does make sense or gives you better insight from those who disagree with you.

I believe in ghosts and I believe places can be haunted, but I am not a ghost hunter. I have a friend who runs a ghost hunting group in Colorado but I don't think it is really possible to make contact with ghosts or spirits on our level of existence. I do believe in reincarnation. I do believe places can be haunted but not by ghosts who can interact with living humans. I don't think anyone is going to be having a social cup of tea with a ghost. Ghosts are something leftover from life. I prefer to think we don't hang around after death but get recycled/ reincarnated and move on to something new instead. Possibly not always a human being, people seem to take that for granted.

I photograph old and abandoned houses, mostly in rural Ontario. I've been doing so for more than 10 years now. I've never seen a ghost or felt a presence. I did get attacked by bees, birds and once I think I stepped on a frog - that was the grossest thing. Afterwards I couldn't find it but it still squicks me (gives me sick shivers). I've also seen my share of mummified animals. But, it's the living animals which usually keep me from entering an abandoned house. I also don't like the idea of trespassing beyond what I feel is polite. I am Canadian.

I have been a Pagan since my college days, officially. I always questioned religion but didn't do much about it until I was out in the world, on my own. I think of myself as an Atheist Earth Witch because I don't believe in gods but I do believe in life, nature and people. I'm a quiet Pagan, a lot of what I do is personal, just for myself. But, I do like to help anyone who is interested in learning more.

I read about issues involving ecology, history and science. These seem very connected to me. If I could go back in time (and not die right away) I would like to be an alchemist. They didn't just get stuck at turning things into gold. They were early scientists in the time of herbalists and Witches. No doubt they had thousands of great theories which didn't get written down somewhere - or more likely did get scribbled out somewhere, had something spill on it and wound up being used for kindling.

Looking forward to getting started!

Laura

This is from my old Live Journal posts.

LiveJournal has a very nice bookmarklet but with my web browser, Chrome, bookmarklets tend to fall off the screen too soon. I'm going to try an application instead. But, it hasn't been updated since 2011. Time flies online.

I'm not girly girl, I am a bit of a loner and I must be watered at least weekly and set in a partially sunny window. Zone 3 to 4.

Semagic is working.

LiveJournal doesn't have categories for niche topics but the tags will work. I'm going to see how LJ will work for me as a hub for content curation. I've got my own sites but they don't cover everything that catches my interest. Especially as my interest tends to wander around a lot. Maybe I can move a lot of my efforts from Scoop.it to LiveJournal. Scoop.it has become more focused on business, SEO, marketing and commercialism and anything personal seems to be unwanted (in spite of what they say, or used to say).

I was trying to do the same on Blogger but there is so little support there, no new features and updates to the old. Seems Google is just waiting for Blogger to finish dying so they can close it down and not step on too many toes. But, I won't bad mouth Google, too much. They did save the old newsgroups! They still live on in Google Groups. I hope they will be well archived if ever Google stops wanting to keep them.

The Bad Girl Bloggers seem to have retired. The name is getting passed around as a sex blogger award but the site has no posts since 2011. Maybe that's just as well. I get tired with the attitude that women who talk about sex are bad girls.

On one hand, it's kind of fun to think of yourself as wicked, in a sexy way. I don't like being judged that way however. As if any woman who thinks about sex, likes sex, or has sex is doing something wrong. You can't be a good girl sex blogger. Nice girls don't write a sex blog.

So every woman writing a sex blog must be a bad, wicked creature. Except, we're not. Sex bloggers are just people.