New Blog Hosting

If you're seeing this post, DNS has updated, and you've been directed to my new blog hosting. If I've done everything correctly, all of my previous posts are available here, at the same URLs. Hopefully I've even set up the Atom feed so that anyone using a feed reader has been automatically redirected as well.

This blog had been hosted on Wordpress.com its entire life - 14 years now! I think that if you're looking for somewhere to write, without hassling with any details, the Wordpress platform is a great choice. It certainly served me well.

The new hosting is GitHub Pages. In setting up the woodworking plans website, I learned the Jekyll static site builder. While I wish GitHub Pages were using a slightly newer version of it, it's still the case that Jekyll is a pretty slick tool.

Since the import needed some massaging to fit how I wanted to structure things here, I have some fun observations to share from the archives:

• I made this migration just in time to save some content. Many photos, including those on one of my most-read posts, were stored on Picasa, a service that Google as moved into archive mode. Others were stored on Dropbox, which no longer supports the Public folder in the same way. The photos are now hosted on this site, so you can once again see them in their full resolution.
• My migration was too late to save other content. All of the Basho sites are gone. It seems like the Wayback Machine is even missing lots of the old Basho blog. All Bitbucket content is gone. If I could find a more modern source for those links, I moved them (e.g. pointing to the Webmachine github repo). If I couldn't, I left the links as-is (i.e. broken), so that someone else can try the archaeology themselves.
• The evolution of the Wordpress editor led to a sort of consistent inconsistency. Most of the inconsistency came from my earliest posts, where it's obvious that I didn't like the editor, and hand-wrote the HTML myself. Even the fact that I used to double-space after sentence-ending periods was preserved! I guess we'll see if the HTML I'm writing for Jekyll stays consistent over time … or if I switch to blogging in Markdown!

From my notes, it looks like it took about ten days to complete the conversion. That's at probably at an average of an hour or so per day. It has been a fun learning process. We'll see if I write any more, less, or differently because of it.

For now, I'm looking forward to better syntax highlighting and intra-page linking, as well as continuing to ignore comments (which have been 100% spam for years), living happily ignorant of visitor statistics (which I think may be mostly unhelpful emotional manipulation for me), and cutting out one hosting fee.

A tiny sidenote: I've also freshened up the twitter handle I claimed for this site years ago. If you don't use a feed reader, but you do use Twitter, consider following @beerriot @hobbyist for updates. Updated October 2021: restarting twitter afresh is hard. Back to the account I've used forever!

Categories: Meta Development