Necropraxis

Welcome to my new domain!

For a while now, I have been less than enamored of Blogger, for a number of reasons. The most continuously irritating aspect has actually been the URL rewriting by visitor location. But there are other more substantive issues as well, such as Google’s project of unifying their products (which I understand but do not like) and the poor Blogger backup functionality (it does not export images, for example).

Further, I have never really liked the name of my old blog. The meaning of “untimately” is only that it is one of the ways that I most commonly misspell a word (don’t ask me why I thought that was a good idea for a name). Really, at the time when I started my old blog, I knew that if I waited for a name that I was really satisfied with I would never actually begin. So I just picked something that was somewhat arbitrary and got on with it.

But now I think I have a name that I like, that makes sense, that is easy to remember, and that is rather unique. The meaning of the name Necropraxis is twofold. Necro and praxis, of course, refer to death and practice (as in contrast to theory). Necromancy, despite recent linguistic corruption, is more properly predicting the future by communication with the dead. So necropraxis, being the practice of manipulating death and unlife, more closely captures the idea of undead than necromancy.

Necropraxis, in addition to gesturing toward my fascination with legends of the undead, also makes sense when considering OSR gaming. By playing (or learning from) the older editions of games, we are reviving them. Animating them to serve our current needs. Not allowing them to rest or vanish into the past as nothing but curiosities.

I’m still learning how to use WordPress, so the visual style and layout will likely change, but I wanted to go ahead and make the move, because once I made the decision to change and registered the domain, I found myself reluctant to publish new content to Untimately. Like my original blog launch using Blogger, I figured that it would be better to just get this off the ground even if the presentation was not perfect. I have learned enough about WordPress that I don’t think anything like static URLs should change going forward. However, I still need to find a good blogroll plugin and play around with how comments are handled. So, if anyone can recommend a good blogroll plugin (something that sorts by recent post and shows image previews would be best), I would be appreciative.

15 thoughts on “Necropraxis

  1. Random Wizard

    Nice work. I would be interesting in hearing your thoughts on wordpress after you have had some time to work on it, say… in a couple of months. You might start a mass exodus from blogger!

    Reply
  2. Sean Holland

    Welcome to WordPress! I have found it an entirely serviceable home for my journal for several years.

    Necropraxis, excellent. I, too, have issues with the use of the word necromancy for the magic of death (see http://wp.me/pylJj-2h), however much it has become synonymous among gamers for such.

    Reply
  3. Rushputin

    So, having just done it a couple of hours ago, importing the contents of your Blogger blog is _stupidly_ easy, should you want to (and I think you should; don’t walk away from that content).

    Reply
    1. admin Post author

      It’s good to know the importation process is not hard. Is there a tool you used to do it? The real problems, though, are the external links that go to blogspot. I don’t want to break the context of old cross-site discussions. I could put together some sort of complicated redirect system, or have the content on both blogs, but both of those approaches have shortcomings.

      Don’t worry though; I’m not planning on walking away from the old content. I will continue to monitor the old blog for comments and respond as necessary, at least for as long as Google maintains the service. It’s just that the new stuff will go here. At least, that seems like the most sane approach right now. I may come up with a better solution later.

      (Also, I’m responding as admin right now, I think… let’s see how that works out.)

      Reply
      1. Rush

        I ended up using “Blogger Importer,” which was basically Tools -> Import -> Blogger and following the directions.

        I did realize that it pulls over labels as categories and not the more analogous tags. Fortunately, there’s also a “Categories and Tags Converter” plugin (also available from Tools -> Import) that you can use to flip them from one to the other.

        As far as I can tell, the move went smoothly. All of the posts were brought over. The images, however, were not. But those are really hosted in Picasa Web, not Blogger. I’m in the market for a plugin that’ll download those images to my WordPress install and update the links. I definitely don’t want to go back through four years’ posts changing images. Ick. Of course, I might have to go in and do something like that anyway, since I’m taking my domain name with me and it looks like that’s broken a bunch of internal links. 🙁

      2. Brendan

        @Rush

        Thanks for the info. The lack of proper image backup is definitely one of my complaints about Blogger. By the way, is email notification working for you?

        I still need to decide how I want to use categories and tags in this new blog.

  4. Adverb

    Enjoy the new digs. I literally just discovered the old blog yesterday, so I’m glad to be starting out here on Day One.

    Reply
  5. shortymonster

    Nice new place you’ve got here. I’ve been on WordPress since I started blogging, and even though the domain name changed a few months ago, WordPress still powers my blog, and does a damned fine job of it. Kinda glad I never went down the Blogger route after what a few people have said about it.

    Also, loving the blog name and justification. Like yourself I came upon a random name – inspired in part by my 2 decade old nickname – and decided to just go for it.

    Reply
  6. Logan Knight

    If you’re still looking for a good blogroll plugin, I’m using WP Social Blogroll on my (not yet launched) site.
    You can stick it anywhere you want using sidebars/widgets, format it in a variety of different ways, choose which categories of links each roll will show, really it’s just pretty damned good.
    Also if you haven’t set up Jetpack yet it’s worthwhile creating a wordpress.com account to do so, it has some pretty nifty features.
    I don’t know anything about importing from Blogger but if you come across anything in WordPress you need help with feel free to shoot me an email.

    Reply
    1. Brendan

      @Logan

      Yeah, I think WP Social is the one I am experimenting with. I haven’t been able to figure out how to get a Google API key though.

      Reply
      1. Logan Knight

        I’m currently in my… 5th? hour of a road trip so right now I can’t remember if it’s just the single one you need or individual keys or.. It’s been a while since I set that part up. If you haven’t figured it out before I get home in a few days I’ll send you an email with screenshots of my settings and steps and all that jazz, it took some tweaking but it’s really good, I’d tried a few others beforehand and it made them look embarrassing.

        Also just so’s you know I checked it to send me an email notification for replies but got nothing.

      2. Brendan

        @Logan

        I got the basics working (I’m pretty sure it is using the Google API successfully now since external blog favicons are showing up), but I haven’t been able to get the blogroll to show latest posts, despite the fact that the current setting is: “Displays the blogname, the age of the latest article and its title. Each element in its own line” and “Use Google Feed Discovery” is also enabled.

        Sorry to bother you with this configuration nonsense. :-/

  7. Logan Knight

    I’m about to take my girlfriend to work but shoot me an email (logantknight at where you’d expect, if’n it doesn’t show you that) and I’ll go through it properly with you when I get home.

    Reply

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