It was 80 here today. Yet we still have a pile of month-old snow out in front of our house.
Well, all good things must come to an end. Or so the cliche tells us. This blog is going to die a quick, unsympathetic death in about a month. Don’t worry, I’ll still be blogging and filling your free time with the genius that is me, just not here.
I’ve been frustrated by many aspects of Typepad over the last six months or so. Some trouble posting perfectly legitimate files. A couple downtimes. An apparent focus on business blogging needs rather than those of us who are just dorks writing in our pajamas. Seriously, if I get one more e-mail telling me how to improve my business through Typepad… So, with my account coming up for renewal next month, it seems like a good time to shut this down and depart for greener pastures. Or at least a different pasture.
I picked Typepad two years ago because Blogger sucked, I wanted some freedom to make my blog look pretty, and I wanted more reliability. I didn’t mind paying for a blogging service when I was posting at least once a day, if not more. But now that I’ve scaled back my writing a bit, I can’t justify the expense.
Blogger has improved, thanks to Google finally sinking some money into it. But it still kind of sucks. They offer the same generic themes they’ve always had, and I’m too lazy to learn any HTML to create my own. I investigated three other free services, including the free service offered by Typepad. It is verrrrry sexy. Nice to look at, easy to navigate, and probably more reliable than the other platforms. But, it has two fundamental problems: 1) it doesn’t support Safari, my browser of choice, for posting and B) in order to comment, you must be a member. It’s “free and easy” to join, but I didn’t want all of my loyal readers to have to sign up for an account just to add your comments. Especially since that means you would get e-mails from the hosting company each month.
I thought about rolling the dice and learning how to code myself, either using Moveable Type or WordPress. But that would mean dropping money on a hosting plan, and the whole idea is to get away from that. And did I mention I’m lazy?
In the end, I picked WordPress’ free service. I’ve been playing around with it for about a month, and it seems like it will work. I’m still stuck with their skins, but they have more to offer than Blogger so I can hopefully vary them from time-to-time. There are a few limitations that are annoying, but I can live with them. Best of all, I can import all my posts from this blog into the new one, so we won’t lose any history. I’m not sure if the comments will come with, but hey, you know what you said. Perhaps I’ll read back and repost some of the greatest comments hits from the past two plus years.
Next, came the struggle of what to name the new blog. I wanted it to be something kind of clever, easy to remember, yet semi-anonymous. I thought I had a really cool name, but I decided it wasn’t terribly clever after all, and it was confusing to type in correctly. So I picked one that all of you should be able to recall quickly but gives me some anonymity. Oh, and it lends itself to a few catchy little acronyms. MMMM, acronyms!
I’ve been double-posting for about a week, just to test skins and whatnot, so you’re welcome to go check it out at anytime. I’ll probably blog here through Good Friday, then export all the historical files across and shut this down. So go take a look: