Changes coming to this site…

After a long while of letting the weeds grow around here, I’ve been working like a bee on getting the site & blog back to tip-top shape. A few things have been made very obvious to me. Such as…

• I need to free myself from silly tasks that take a lot of time and effort for very little in return. I have other things in life that are important- things that I really want to do and I don’t want to waste my time fighting software, hackers, spammers, SQL databases, etc.
• For the last two and a half years that I’ve used Wordpress I have found it to be a double edged sword. Wordpress is very flexible and powerful, but it requires a lot of upgrading to keep it safe and stable.
• I’ve never had an easy time upgrading Wordpress. Each time I tried to upgrade it I ended up spending waaaay too much time on it. Often I wasn’t even successful. I don’t have the time or energy to play blog-software-geek anymore. I want a simple, reliable and hacker free blog solution that doesn’t require me to do a darn thing to keep it that way.
• So I’m switching the blog back to the blogger service from Google. First, they’re not a fly by night. They’re huge. They have the bandwidth. They have the resources. They make it easy to do what I want to do (write posts) and they’ve gotten better at allowing me to customize the blog with widgets and stuff. But the biggest thing is they’ll keep the blog hacker, virus and bug free safe for my readers. And I don’t need to fart around with databases, PHP files, learning CSS and XML and all that other rot.
• Wordpress doesn’t have an “export” option for posts and comments. At least not the version I have. So I will manually copy & paste all the posts from the last two and a half years. Sounds fun, huh?
• Additionally I want a better hosting service for the site. My current service is fine, but I want phone support. I’ve found my new solution and so I’m making a change there as well.
• Oh, and I’ll be redirecting my Feedburner RSS system to the new blog once everything’s all solid. So you folks following in your feed readers shouldn’t miss a beat.

Overall it’ll be a simpler, cleaner system for me to admin and it will be a faster, safer place for you to visit. There may be the occasional service hiccup over the next few days as we switch things around, but by the end of the week we should be all set.

Thanks for hanging in there with me.