Welcome to NevilleHobson dot com

Finally, I pressed the button and pulled the switch! From today, this is the place on the internet where I’ll be.

NevOn, the blog I’ve been writing since July 2004, now becomes the archive of record for the 1,470 posts, 2,030 comments and 835 trackbacks that, cumulatively, make up some terrific conversations.

If you subscribed to the FeedBurner RSS feed at NevOn, your subscription should transfer seamlessly to the similar feed for this blog. So you need do nothing – you’ll continue to receive my content. If you subscribed through any other means, well, there is no seamless transfer, unfortunately. In which case, you can sign up to the new feed here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Nevillehobsoncom

While this blog is now fully operational, it’s still a work in progress (a beta version, in fact). During the coming weeks, I’ll be working behind the scenes to finalize what’s here and how it works, especially the non-blog content that typically you’d access via the menu tabs at the top of the page or in the sidebar to your right.

Mostly, though, I now want to resume normal blogging service.

So, welcome to NevilleHobson.com. I hope we have a great time here.

Neville Hobson

Social Strategist, Communicator, Writer, and Podcaster with a curiosity for tech and how people use it. Believer in an Internet for everyone. Early adopter (and leaver) and experimenter with social media. Occasional test pilot of shiny new objects. Avid tea drinker.

  1. Stuart Bruce

    All looks very good. Nice and clean. After the recent debate on Shel’s site about blogrolls it will be interesting to see how many people make their way to the connections page.

  3. Niall Cook

    Neville,

    Wow – what a beautiful design. Strangely enough, I’m also in the process of setting up my non-Hill & Knowlton blog (somewhere I can say the things I’d prefer not to associate so strongly with my employer). Strangely, I too am using WordPress. Strangely, I too am using this WordPress theme.

    Great minds?

    Niall

    PS. There is a great WordPress plugin that allows people to subscribe by email to comment threads they have posted. I’ll dig out the link and send it to you – something you may want to consider.

  4. neville

    Thanks, guys, I appreciate your warm words.

    Niall, the K2 theme for WordPress really is very good, especially the latest builds for WP 2.x. I’ve only really lightly tweaked the templates, relying mostly on a custom CSS style – one of the great options with K2.

    That plugin sounds interesting. You can subscribe to the comments RSS feed – a really good feature of this new blog, something I couldn’t have on the old blog. Then there’s coComment. Unfortunately, though, that doesn’t work here because the commenting functionality uses AJAX and coComment has a problem with that. As it’s not a WP or K2 issue, I hope coComment’s developers will have a fix for that soon.

    Oh and, yes, great minds ;)

  5. Luis Suarez

    Congrats, Neville! I have already updated the subscriptions but I thought I would also drop a comment over here to wish you all the best in this your next adventure !

    Like most people have indicated already, I really like the design of the new weblog. It looks terrific ! You are going to force me to come back to it over and over again, instead of going through the RSS feeds ;-)

  6. Marc Orchant

    Shiny. Welcome to your new home Neville – it looks wonderful. If I were a merketing guy (oh wait, I am!), I might claim: “Same great flavor you’ve enjoyed for years in a new, improved, easy-to-use package!”

    ;^)

  7. neville

    Thanks, Luis, I appreciate your comments. You’re welcome here any time :)

    Marc, and to you, thanks. You’ve got a great new gig over at ZDNet, so congratulations to you!

  8. Netanel Jacobsson

    Nev, looks great – wish you all the best. I too am planning to go over to WordPress for my upcoming mashupmedia blog, however it certainly takes time to understand how wordpress works – not very straight forward – but obviously much more flexible. Anyway – love your design & keep up the good work!

    Subcribed to your new feed in Maxthon.

    Cheers.

  9. Eric E

    Like the look. Are you making a shift in your blogging, or will you be writing about pretty much the same things?

    This could be your opportunity to reveal your soulful poetry for us all to admire.

    :-)

  10. neville

    Thanks, guys.

    Net, WP does take a bit of time to figure out if you want to do anything that changes any defaults in your design. It’s all in the PHP and CSS.

    Eric, I don’t plan to make any major shift in what I write about compared to what I wrote about before. Still, this new place might stimulate some new thinking.

    And a poet, I’m not!

  11. Bryan Person

    Neville:

    Congratulations on the switch, and on a job well done! I know this is something you’ve been working on for some time — it must be a tremendous relief.

    Given that you’ve redirected the Feedburner feed as well, I hope there won’t be too much of a hit to your new-found No. 6 business-blogger ranking :)

    * I’m curious about why you ultimately decided to have the new blog at Nevillhobson.com and not at Nevon.net ? Did it have to do with the complications of switching to a new blog hosting service (I’ve gone through the process of trying to import posts from Blogger into WordPress — it was a nightmare, and I still haven’t finished — so I can imagine that it was something you struggled with), or was it more that you somehow needed to “move on” from nevon.net?

    * Is it the K2 template that allows you to incorporate the “About”, “Contact”, etc. pages so seamlessly into the new blog, or does that functionality come from a separate WordPress plugin I must have missed? In any case, it works beautifully!

    Congrats again! Looking forward to being part of the conversation over here.

  14. neville

    Jeff, David, thanks. See you both in Palo Alto next week!

    Bryan, thanks for your comments. Re your questions, the move to a new domain and new name was greatly influenced by the real issue of maintaining URLs if I had moved the nevon.net domain. I’ve been grappling with this for some months.

    Basically, to ensure that URLs continued, it was incredibly complex (from how I looked at it) and would have involved things like upgrading the TypePad account in order to get at the templates, creating a special export template that remapped URLs before the content export, then other things like Apache mod rewrites, .htaccess files, etc. And all with no absolute guarantee that it would all work.

    Plus when you export your content out of TypePad, you only get the text – none of the graphics. And I have lots of graphics in many posts.

    Then I had the epiphany one morning a few weeks ago whilst in the shower! Start over. Leave everything where it is, move house, start afresh. Yes, there will be a Technorati hit but, frankly, I’m not that concerned about that (more concerned about discrepancies in Technorati’s data, as I’ve commented here last week). If I post here in a way that interests others, then that ranking will rebuild soon enough. Plus the old place is still there.

    Re the pages you mention, that’s primarily a function of WordPress, introduced with version 1.5 last year (this blog’s running the latest 2.0.1). It enables you to include pages outside the blog-post and category infrastructure but within the overall site database. What K2 does is present those page names as nice little menu items in the tabs. Other themes treat them in different ways. So if you have WP 1.5.x or later, you will have the capability. It’s then down to the theme you use.

  18. neville

    Thanks, guys, appreciated.

    Philip, I’ll be touch re the IAOC conference. Kevin, you can be sure there will be loads of posts – and podcasts – from the New Communications Forum event next week. It’s going to be a terrific event.

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