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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; I hate it when people talk about things that they don’t know about.

I was reading a post wherein a commenter on the post was upset that the post referred to wordpress.com and blogspot.com blogs as free, easy and customizable. The commenter argued that Blogger and Wordpress don’t offer custom domains. They definitely do offer custom domains such as .com, .net, .info, .biz and others, almost anyone domain you so choose really.

The only cost you will incur is purchasing the domain of your choice (around R100 or less) and redirect your DNS (which only some hosts charge for). That’s it. Bob’s your Uncle, Fanny’s your Aunt. Done and dusted.

Strangely enough if that person had actually read this blog and simply done a search they would have found that I have posted on this topic before. My post was Blogger specific as I was using blogger back then.

Let’s review a quote from that blog post:

You need to purchase your domain and make sure that it’s working before you can select it as your new domain on blogger. Once these steps have been completed your old url will point to your new url so there wont be any links lost or time wasted in the past.

It’s as easy as that.

Wordpress is much the same as far as I know (which admittedly isn’t too far). If you have a wordpress.com blog already all you have to do is enter your admin panel and enter a domain you have already registered and Wordpress will redirect all your links to that domain. Simple.

From the Wordpress website:

It’s here: you can now use your own custom domain with your WordPress.com blog. For example, if your blog was currently at example.wordpress.com you could buy example.com from us and we would automatically move your blog over and redirect all your links and readers to the new domain.

If you don’t have a domain registered you can use Worpress to register your desired domain for a measly $15/year. That is cheap. In fact that is under R400 a year to have a great looking, functional and customised website.

Vottle has pumped some serious moola in to their advertising campaign recently. I think we have all heard them on 5fm or whichever other radio station it was.

Yet I am left a bit baffled and bemused at their approach to blogging. They clearly believe they have a massive product if they are willing to pump money in to their campaign. They clearly have the money to do this, but they have a BLOGGER blog?

Not only is the website a .com url, which means they have a hosting package attache to that .com, but they most probably have a great big hosting package to cope with the traffic they built up over the ad campaigns. So I ask you, where is the .com/blog blog? What are you thinking?

Blogger might have been cool a couple of ages ago, but now blogger blogs are filled with porn, spam and clutter. .com blogs are the way forward, .co.za blogs are a very suitable substitute, but a blogger.com blog is not acceptable. They might have redirected the blog to “blog.vottle.com” But they have chosen to keep the Blogger template. This really makes no sense to me.

I suppose that any online presence in the form of a blog is better than no online presence. But surely an ONLINE company knows better and knows about better services?

Lock it up and throw away the key. Get a Wordpress blog.

Ok, that heading is a bit overboard but I was fed up and about to slit my blogging wrists (but how would i type then???). So instead of doing that I have moved to Wordpress. I tried, I really did, but I just couldn’t get what I needed out of blogger, she was good for me at one point, but in the end, the relationship needs to be a two way street. I was giving more than I was getting.

After I read this post on techrunch I knew I had to move and was making the right decision

Thanks to the gracious assistance of one Mr Justin Hartman, I am able to host my site and have moved. Dude, you kick ass!

Welcome to the new look for nicharalambous.com. I will not be changing the theme for a while now. I promise. I have said that before but this time it is believable (that’s what all pathological liars say isn’t it?).

Please let me know what You think of theme, if you dig the design and if you think I stink!

I have been having some serious problems with blogger of the last 24 hours… is it just me?

Haloscan is a comment moderation tool that replaces bloggers comments. I am trying to make use of this due to my recent discovery of coComment (see TechAttacks 3 & 3 update). coComment allows you to follow comments you have made on any blog,account, website or anything. Now to make use of coComment through my own blog I need to get rid of Bloggers comment system and install Haloscan. This all seems very complicated, but trust me, if I can do it, anyone can.

The pro’s of having Haloscan is that you can customize the look of your comment box and it has a directly built in extension for users who wish to make use of coComment (perfect for me). It also allows you to track comment numbers, people, stats etc. Blogger does not do this.

The only downfall I can see so far is that I don’t think that I can keep any of the old blogger comments without personally copying and pasting them in to the Haloscan comment block one by one… that’s a lot of work for one person. So I am in the process of debating the whole value of using Haloscan if it means losing all the brilliance of my readers. We shall see.

Keep a close look and see how it all works out. Let me know what you all think.