Announcement, Brief Hiatus And Goodbye Carnivorous Conservative

Last month I decided to pursue a major blog re-design and move from Typepad to WordPress, after blogging here since September 2004. I actually began blogging a few months before that as ItsJustDan on Blogger.

For the record, during my time here I published 19,503 posts (counting this one), received 281,853 comments and 23,881,057 pageviews, last I checked – according to Typepad.

Immediately after Zell Miller spoke at the 2004 Republican Convention, I believe it was Chris Matthews who commented that, those conservatives sure love their red meat, or words to that effect – and the original name for this blog was born: Carnivorous Conservative.

My first banner featured a photoshop of a Tyrannosaurus Rex reaching his mouth through some broad-leafed trees and chewing the head off of 2004 Democrat nominee John Kerry. There was even blood photoshopped in, as I recall.

There was relatively little self-policing, or political correctness across the blogosphere in those days. That was actually during the time of Rathergate, after which things began to change somewhat rapidly. Instead of priding ourselves on how many insults we endured from them, pundits and media as a whole eventually wanted to be one of us, … in their own fashion, of course. Also, in some ways, I think many blogs and bloggers cleaned up their acts from somewhat, to quite a bit.

I’m not saying I have, or haven’t, mind you – Lord knows, I still have my good and bad days! ; ) But I digress.

Given how things work, I couldn’t actually eliminate the carnivous conservative portion of the underlying url here. Except for archived posts, I believe that will happen after the re-launch. All of my previous posts and comments have been exported and will remain accessible after the move, hopefully this weekend.

In any event, the new and, hopefully, somewhat improved RiehlWorldView blog should launch on Monday, though it may be postponed until Wednesday. I employed two independent developers to “get ‘er done,” as it were. And though I still antipate post-re-launch tweaks and burps given the amount of customization I wanted, I’ve already told them I wouldn’t hold them to Monday morning if something needed a bit more work here, or there.

In short, blogging should be light to non-existent here for a spell to help with a smoother transition. In terms of how one will arrive at the blog, including via old links, blogrolls and such, that won’t change at all.

As always, thanks for reading.