Changing blogs again - how and why
My blog looks different again? I've not posted anything in months?
Why does my blog look different?
Did I really change blog engines again?!
Yes I change blog engines more than I post. I fancied learning a bit more about hosted WordPress, so I've moved my blog to it. I've managed to get everything back up and running and learnt a little more about the whole blog engine thing from the user perspective.
Last time I did this I moved from WordPress.com to a hosted SubText engine.I blogged about it here. I moaned about the fact that WordPress doesn't have a BlogML export function - terrible lockin I said of course. Well SubText supposedly had a BlogML Export, but I couldn't get it to work without exceptions all over the place so I had to give up in the end. Thankfully I had access to the backend database so I could get my data out that way.
Bad choices for permanent urls:
Another thing I've learnt: don't set important permanent URLs to something that might change. E.g. my feedburner URL had my blog title in it (it was feeds.feedburner.com/nickandhisnet.) Well I decided I hated my blog title, so now my main subscription URL had to change. Whoops.
This time I set my feedburner URL to something more permanent. Now it's: http://feeds.feedburner.com/nickmeldrum/. Now my blog title can change and I won't lose any subscribers that I had.
I've still broken the permanent URLS to the old blog entries - a big no no of course, and one that wasn't strictly necessary, but I wanted a better permalink style. I may set up redirects to the old ones - but I only had a few blog entries anyway so I'm not too fussed.
Host Speeds:
Another thing I discovered: I had to change hosts to do this (cheapest and easiest option was a "1-click install" with "123-reg.co.uk". Before I was with the much smaller www.openhosting.co.uk.) I have discovered that actually openhosting was pretty fast and 123-reg can be really really slow. Yuck.
Well for now I can put up with the slow speed as it's given me a load of nice functionality very cheaply. I'm considering in the medium-term to move to a virtual private server and my own blog engine anyway. Hopefully that will be a bit faster.
Why haven't I posted anything for months?
Why I went away:
Well yes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions blah blah blah. You may notice that the time I stopped blogging was around February 14th. Well romantic old me went and proposed to my now Fiancee, so the last few months were awash with wedding plans. the next few months will be too of course!
Also, my day job (which unfortunately has to take priority) got proper busy too. A system I built has started to get some “Market traction” I believe they call it. So I’ve been nose to the grindstone getting stuff into it that our clients want. All very exciting stuff, but takes me away from learning new stuff and blogging about it.
Why I have come back:
Well I’ve just been to the fantastic: “Progressive .Net” tutorials course run by the superb company: Skillsmatter. I will blog more about what I learnt later. Suffice to say the excellent speakers rejuvenated my developer spirit and I’m all excited about a load of technologies. So much that I want to write samples, blog about them and maybe even eventually use them in some professional manner to make my life and my clients lives better! Woohoooo!
I’m particularly excited about RavenDB. This is a document database written in .Net that is about to be launched. It was written mostly by Ayende. It looks really really nice for many many reasons.
Anyway – that’s enough for now. My Fiancee would like to watch Lost with me. It’s nice to be back though!