First off, welcome to my new website. You might be thinking, it looks the same. But trust me, a LOT has changed behind the scenes. Last week, I made the leap and left my longtime host, Doteasy, and CMS, Blogger, and moved my site to Dreamhost and WordPress. Why did I make the change? As of March 26, Blogger is no longer supporting FTP publishing.

Warning: extremely geeky and lengthy post ahead. Back in 2001, I opened an account on Blogger and started typing away. I first hosted the site for free on tripod.com. Once they force placed ads onto my site, I bought my own domain name and hosted the site at doteasy.com. It was a pretty good deal, you buy your domain name through Doteasy and they provide free hosting. I had Blogger publish updates via FTP and also hosted a couple static pages. To make edits to the static pages and make updates to the site, I accessed my server via FTP. Blogger also published new posts to my site via FTP. So now that Blogger was canceling FTP support, I had to look for a new web host.

I didn’t start off my search looking for a new host, I started by looking for a new CMS. There were only a couple solutions I looked at; Movable Type, Tumblr, and WordPress. I didn’t give MT too much of a shot at all. Tumblr was a little too simple in my opinion. I did have a tiny bit of experience working on a WordPress blog in the past so naturally I went with that. As for my host, I chose Dreamhost because they have reasonable hosting fees and offered one click installation of WordPress.

Once I got familiar with how WP was set up, I backed up my old site, imported my Blogger posts into WP and made sure all the aspects of the old site made it to the new one. It wasn’t perfect. For some reason, about 16 months worth of posts from 2003-2005 weren’t imported. I ended up manually putting them back in which was not fun at all. I still need to finish a few things up, mainly the photos page. Most of the albums I posted were really old HTML (can you say iframes?) and some of the newer ones I just linked to their respective albums on my Flickr page. Once I figure out how I want to display them, I’ll put them back up. I also need to get a real links page up as well. I just need to make a few tweaks here and there but the main content, the blog, is good to go.

Enjoy.