With the arrival of a new year in my life (29th!), I thought that it would be appropriate to move RhodesSchool over to a different blogging platform. I’ve been on a custom-made blogging platform that has served me very well since 2004 and I am not done with it. My Wedding Blog is still on the platform, as are a whole host of my other sites. With RhodesSchool, I wanted to bring it to a new platform because this is the type of issue that I deal with on a day-to-day basis at FeedBurner. We deal with publishers who have to modify their .htaccess file, install the Ordered List WordPress plugin, and embed various widgets and items into their sidebars.

I wanted to roll up my sleeves, get a little dirty, and get better acquainted to this particular platform. Will I stay at WordPress forever? I doubt it. It’s one of many blogging platforms that publishers are using. Rick Stratton is using Feed.us and that looks to be a promising tool. I am planning on giving it a try next.

The other thing you’ll notice is that this blog is hosted at a new url: jakeparrillo.com. I’ve been looking for something to put here, and as I look around the web, I notice that many of the folks that I admire, are building out their blogs at their personal domains. As we move forward, I’ll look to build out the rest of the domain with other pages. We’ve added some new functionality like a “resyndicate” page (hat tip, Eric Olson), so you can take our content and spread it, embed it, and share it all around the web and beyond. Over on the right, we’ve brought over our “shared items” from our Google Reader and branded them as “Jake’s Reading List”. As a lot of publishers have discovered, it’s a super useful feature to share items from around the web with your readers.

Now, onto the “downside” of moving platforms. The archives are in limbo. I have over 3 years of content that I’m going to work to bring over. For the time being, we’re without them (ahem…Phil. I’m looking in your direction!), but I’m hopeful we’ll be able to bring them over in some fashion. I need to consult with some SEO experts to figure out the best way to do things. Right now, I’m going to leave RhodesSchool.com pointing over there, and just change the feed until we can get it nailed down. In the long term, I think that we’ll grow our visibility inside of search engines because of our naming convention on permalinks, the new domain, and the standardized blogging platform.

In the meantime, enjoy what’s going on here. I’ll do my best to raise the level of discussion here at RhodesSchool, but as always, you’ll probably have plenty of YouTube videos, slamming of Chicago Democrats, and an occasional Maisy update (or two).

While you’re here, go ahead and put our new comments feature through it’s paces by leaving a comment or two!