The Deal with My Blog

Here's the deal.

When I started this blog, things were not as advanced in the technology as they are now. You wrote your stuff, and it got archived by the month.

Then things started changing. There was a period of time when Blogger was testing some new program (or something; I'm not sure what the right word it), and it made everything more complicated for a while, though they said it was going to make things easier.

Then at some point you had to choose whether to change over to the new way or keep the old way. I chose to keep the old way at the time, thinking I could change later if I wanted to.

Then I noticed that John Michael Talbot's blog had the same basic look as mine, but that it was in a different format from mine, more techno-looking and not as classic and pretty.

Then I tried to put a counter on my blog, because a friend said she was able to see from what countries people were reading her blog, and I thought that would be fun. But to install (if that's the right verb) the counter, it said I would have to switch my blog over to whatever it was that makes it more complicated. And it said that making the switch might cause me to lose some things.

I decided it wasn't worth it.

But in the meantime, everybody's blogs have this ability to tag things and archive them by subject matter and titles, rather than just seeing a month and year--and now I've written so much that there's no way to find old things, unless I happen to remember the time of year I wrote it. And I doubt anyone else cares, but I would kind of like to be able to find my old posts more easily, and to group them by themes.

And I'm wondering, if I did switch over, what exactly would I lose? And how long would it take me to go back and "tag" everything? And in the long run, would it really even matter?

I think I would have to switch the whole look, because if doing that meant that my blog would end up looking like JMT's, I just wouldn't want to look at it. Not that it's terrible; it's just not so pretty. Well, I just went to look at his and learned that it has been removed; I guess he's just relying on Facebook for communicating these days.

Oh, oh! And update: I just happened to find the blog of a distant friend while ago via Facebook, and he uses the same template with the new look. Somehow, looking at his, it doesn't seem quite as techno-uglified as the other way I had seen it....but it does lose a certain simplicity. (I had no idea this friend was a pen-lover. I would be too, if I could ever make enough money to indulge the habit.) Anyway, here it is, for comparison's sake:

http://austinspub.blogspot.com/

Well, I'm not about to make any major changes right now. Too many other things up in the air to add one more.

But for the future, I wonder if any of you can tell me how much trouble it is to switch over a blog from the old-fashioned way to the new way, or what I'm in danger of losing....

Anyone?