Okay, so what’s up with switching servers? Those of you who are regulars have probably seen me mention that I was considering doing this a time or two in the past, and now I’ve just gone and done it.
Well, really, the primary motivation is very simple — my finances, as always, are somewhat tight, and as much as I liked having TypePad take care of all the nuts-and-bolts of my hosting, as long as I have a working webserver sitting in my apartment, I just couldn’t justify paying for another year of off-site hosting. I’ve been very happy with TypePad during my year and a half or so with them — and I’m extremely thankful that they were as accommodating as they were when I got Slashdotted — but the time came to let my pocketbook take precedence over my laziness (and ineptness) as a sysadmin and “move back home”, so to speak.
So here we are. There are both pros and cons to the move, as often happens with things like this.
First off, the cons — or ‘con’ (singular), really: things may not be quite as snappy around here as they were when I was on TypePad’s servers. I have neither the high-end hardware nor the high-bandwidth connection to the ‘net that TypePad does. Still, I’m doing everything I can to keep things reasonable, from my usual anal-retentive obsession with simple, clean HTML code to working with MovableType 3’s dynamic rendering and page caching. Hopefully it won’t be too terribly bad (but if it is, feel free to stop by my about page and drop a few dollars in my PayPal tip jar to go towards a processor upgrade for my server!). ;)
Oh — and there will be broken image links on older posts as I go through and move the image files from TypePad onto my own server (moving the actual entries is a simple export/import process…unfortunately, images need to be moved manually).
Now, on to the pros.
No broken links: thanks to the common codebase of TypePad and MovableType, I was able to move everything over and keep all of my permalinks the same, so there should be no need to worry about changing your bookmarks or updating any old links to one of my posts that might be lying around out on the ‘net somewhere (plus, it’s good for the Googlejuice).
Site search: there’s now a search field at the top of the sidebar. If you’ve come here looking for anything in particular other than the daily babble, that should make it a bit easier to track things down. In theory, at least.
Comment moderation/TypeKey/MT-Blacklist: Due to the ever-annoying prevalence of comment spammers, I’ve enabled comment moderation MT-Blacklist for the site. Here’s the rundown on how it works:
The first time you comment here, rather than showing up on the site immediately, your comment will go into a ‘moderation’ queue, waiting for me to approve it. Once I check it and verify that it’s a real comment, I’ll approve it, and it will appear on the page. I’ll try to keep up with comments as best I can, though there may be a delay of anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, depending on how close I am to a computer to check in.
As long as you have cookies enabled in your browser and log in from a consistent IP address, the next time you leave a comment, it should appear on the site right away, without needing to go through the moderation process. At least, I think that that’s how it works…it’s all a bit new to me, so if there are growing pains, just bear with me. ;)
The anti-spam plugin MT-Blacklist is being used to watch for comment spam. It should catch and deny any comment spam that hits the website. It will also automatically flag questionable comments and require that I approve them before they go to the site — this includes new comments on posts that are over two weeks old, and comments that have more than five URLs embedded in them.
Now, if you have a TypeKey identity, then there is no moderation process to worry about — as soon as your comment is posted, it will appear on the site MT-Blacklist gives you a ‘free pass’, and will not scan your comments when they are posted. As that’s the quickest, easiest way to go about it, I’d recommend going that route (unless you have some other issue with TypeKey and would prefer not to use it, which is fine, too) — and if you don’t have a TypeKey identity yet, why not go ahead and sign up (it’s free)?
Syndication: I’ve set up all of my syndication feeds to go through FeedBurner. I’m in the process of attempting to set up automatic redirects in Apache so that those of you reading me via a newsreader won’t have to worry about re-subscribing, but that’s proving rather stubborn (odd, since it’s a pretty simple process) — the old feeds won’t disappear until I’m sure I’ve got the redirects working correctly. All my old feed addresses have been redirected to point to the FeedBurner feeds, so you should now automatically be receiving the FeedBurner feeds in your newsreader. However, if you’d like, feel free to stop by my subscriptions page, pick your preferred RSS feed, and grab the new FeedBurner URL.
And…actually, I think that’s it. I’ve kept the same design, and you still have your choice of four stylesheets to choose from (more may show up eventually, but as I’ve been making that particular threat for a good few months now, no reason to hold your breath).
“Kamennoi Ostrov” by 101 Strings Orchestra, The from the album Soul of Russia, The (1996, 10:11).
