The blog was quiet all through February because I just finished a big change to what makes the site tick. Google recently announced that they’d stop supporting blogs like mine this month (edit – now extended till May), so it was time to move to new digs (sort of). I started using Blogger, one of the first (and free!) blogging platforms, around seven years ago, long before it was bought out by Google. One thing that drew me to blogger was their FTP option, in which you use their site for authoring, but then everything gets pushed to your own server. I prefer the full control that hosting all the files on my own server assures me. Blogger’s free hosting is awesome for those that need it, but since I already have a server I prefer dealing with stats, ads, backups, etc. the way I want.
Google was good to leave us FTP bloggers alone when they bought Blogger, but they are finally moving on and soon will be requiring all content to reside on Googles servers. They say FTP bloggers only comprise 0.5% of their user base (which seems REALLY low) and it’s holding them back from introducing new features. Fair enough, it’s been a good (and let’s not forget, free) run.
Over the past couple weeks I’ve picked up and moved to WordPress. Like Google/Blogger, WP offers a hosted solution, but instead of the FTP option you actually load the open source wordpress application on your site. Setting up the php engine was pretty simple, but it took some time to touch up all the posts I exported from Blogger and make a WP template to match the design I was using. But I’m liking it. With WP you really have control of everything under the sheets, and because it’s open source (and very popular) there are tons on plugins and published techniques for tweaking away.
Of course, one big plus about Blogger is Google’s seemingly infinite (and again, free) bandwidth, so I’ll continue to host DuctTapeServer content there. As I’ve seen in the past, one good flood from Engadget can render my server useless for a day (and taking down client sites with it).
