17 June 2006: In The Future Everything Will Be Different

Gazing into the Abyss: Michael Rawdon's Journal

In The Future Everything Will Be Different

This entry is part monologue, and part a request for feedback on said monologue. So if you're familiar with these issues, I'd appreciate an e-mail with any opinions you may have.

As you may know (which is to say, I've mentioned it to a few of you), I've been mulling over moving my journal off of the home-grown Perl scripts it's currently using and making it more like what's known today as a "blog". In keeping with my new(ish) policy of not spending so much time creating infrastructure for my five billion hobbies and instead making use of the efforts of the thousands out there who don't have such a policy, I'm planning to move to some modern blogging software.

I think I'm going to move to WordPress. Not only are people I know using it (such as JD Roth at Four Color Comics, or bbum), but even people who are using Movable Type recommend it. The only person I've talked to who isn't much interested in it is Bill Humphries, but that's because he's a PHP programmer and says he's looked under the hood and shuddered at what he say. (bbum, by contrast, said that he's never seen any PHP that didn't make him shudder.) In any event, the quality of the code is of only marginal interest to me, since I don't really want to spend time modifying it. So I think WordPress it is.

WordPress seems to have all of the blogging features I want, or think I want:

Comments.
Comment-spam-blocking software (e.g., using Akismet).
Hierarchical categories. (IIRC, Chris Hanson favors LiveJournal-style tags over categories, but I think the hierarchical nature is something I want.)
Syndication feeds (RSS or Atom).
Customizable appearance.
Ability to gather info about hits to my blog (via a plug-in) - something I currently do with custom scripts.

And a few other features which look useful and might even be necessary.

I doubt I will move all of the existing comment on my current site to the blog - probably I'll only move a few small, select things. So this is really a "starting anew" experience. Which, since my Web page is over 10 years old, seems like not such a bad idea.

With this move, I'm considering a second move: Paying for Web space.

For the last 7 years I've been fortunate to have space at leftfield.org (formerly spies.com), which is administered by my friend Ceej. Leftfield has been a pretty reliable piece of hardware, and Ceej is usually around to kick it if things go wrong. But of course every so often the machine wedges, and then I can't get my e-mail for a day (or two), my web page is down, etc. And it seems like Leftfield has fewer and fewer active users as time goes on, and that it's becoming mainly a hobby box for Ceej.

So, I'm considering finding a good hosting service for my new blog. Whether or not I move stuff from Leftfield to it, I don't know, Quite possibly not.

Here's what I think I want in a web hosting service:

At least 100 Mb of space. (Currently my whole Web site is about 65 Mb.)
Ability to install and run and appropriately customize Wordpress. This means an install of MySQL, and the ability to get backups of my blog data from their MySQL server. (Wordpress has a plug-in which supports this, so basically I guess this plugin would just need to work.)
Probably the ability to write my own server-side includes and CGI scripts, in the event that I want/need to. This likely means shell access to my account.
Keeps its installed software up-to-date. Particularly its installed version of Ruby.
An e-mail account.
Domain hosting. I have a domain name which I'd like to use for my new journal.
Technical support, if needed. Hopefully this won't involve much more than help getting started, and making sure the machines and software run reliably.
All of this should be fairly inexpensive.

John Scalzi told me that his blog is at 1&1, which seems to meet all these criteria. Since John is no dummy, has a high-traffic blog, and has a vested interest in keeping his blog going (inasmuch as he's said it's been a boon to his career), his opinion counts heavily in my mind. On the other hand, it's trivial to find some people who have had terrible experiences with 1&1, such as here, here and (perhaps most damning) here. On the other hand, there's a (shorter) positive testimony here.

I've also gotten one lukewarm testimony about Dreamhost, but I haven't looked into them very far. (Update: Chris Hanson e-mailed me with an enthusiastic endorsement of Dreamhost.)

(And before you ask, I think I want more - and more control - than I would get using WordPress.com.)

So this is something more of a conundrum. I guess in addition to the above requirements, my main concern is that if I decide down the road that the provider I choose isn't what I really want, that I won't have too big a hassle transferring my domain names and my data. Of course keeping regular backups is my problem. And I guess if the provider sucks, and I don't figure that out before signing up with them, then I'm kind of screwed in the domain name space regardless. Although I suppose it's possible (at additional cost) to buy my domain names through another service (Ceej has in the past recommended Dotster) and just host them at whatever provider I decide on - assuming the provider allows that, of course.

And it is tempting to just stick with Leftfield, which does have its advantages.

So I'd be curious what you, my faithful readers, think. Anything I'm overlooking? Anything I shouldn't worry too much about? Any opinions for or against any of the options I've been considering? Please let me know!