Despite planning on fixing up the site myself, Blogger decided to throw away the old design and leave a blank template so I can start from scratch easier. Also, all comments from Haloscan are gone and probably inaccessible for me since the company was purchased by a company offering different services. I logged in a few months ago to see if I could recover and import them to Blogger's own comment system, but that is impossible. For a few minutes I was a little upset about losing everything, but soon felt extremely relieved and almost liberated. It's sad that all contributions from visitors and fellow bloggers I met are gone, but it will fit in with my decision not to turn on comments, at least for awhile. Posting without the subconscious worry about not getting response may encourage more posting.
I'm wary about these social media buttons attached to each post since it looks tacky and I don't participate in most of those services, but since a lot of people do they will remain in place for for now. I'm going to restore as many links to blogs I read as I can remember, play around with new features, and clean up the old html code. Blogger has finally created a good-looking user interface for Safari so no more having to use Firefox every time I want to make a new post.
