In case any of my readers were wondering why I haven’t updated in a while, the reason should now be evident. I finally broke down last week and admitted to myself that I was never, ever going to set up my own server at home, so I should just pay somebody to do it for me. I went with TextDrive, because they had everything I wanted for a reasonable price.

I moved perlick.org and dorkbutt.com immediately to figure out how the DNS transfer would work (the answer, trivially), and then moved nehrlich.com over. Then it was on to the real challenge – getting a new set of blogging software to work right.

I chose WordPress, because they’re open source, and because MovableType has that wacky license thing going these days. Downloaded it, set it up in a test space, and started messing around. It was remarkably easy to set up. It was more of a pain to get it to look the way I wanted it to. I still don’t understand CSS, but I trial-and-error’d my way to something approximating what I wanted.

And, even better, it was trivial to import all of my old posts. So now everything should be in here. Some of the old links may have broken slightly – they should get you to the right page, but not to the right post any more. But that’s life. Otherwise, everything should be pretty much indistinguishable. Except that now I have comments, a much better interface, and a lot more flexibility in how I do things. I can put posts into multiple categories, I can save drafts and update them later and stuff. So I think it all works. And I even figured out how to make the RSS feed stay the same, so if you read this from afar, you shouldn’t notice any difference. I hope.

Oh, and one new feature in the sidebar. Christopher Allen pointed me towards RSS Digest as an easy way to get my del.icio.us links displayed in the sidebar. So I did it. It’s a free service, asking only for a linkback, so I’m doing that here.

Let me know if anything looks broken. email is fine. Or comment! Yay!