I hate breaking hyperlinks but I’m at it again: this weblog is moving to another host, with slightly different URLs. I’ll redirect some of the old links for a month or so. The new Apetracks will be available at http://apetracks.binary-ape.org. If you’re using the FeedBurner feed then that will continue to work.
Until now I’ve been maintaining the software myself, hosting first on 34sp.com using MoveableType, then binary-ape.org moved to Textdrive, using Wordpress for the blog. Running the blog software yourself gives a lot freedom to customise, freedom from AUPs, and probably more freedom of speech. But it also requires a fair bit of maintenance. I’ve barely been updating the blog comments recently, so the overhead of regular Wordpress upgrades is just too much work. The current spate of self-hosted Wordpress blogs being compromised has emphasised this. I work as a sysadmin during the day, and maintaining PHP apps in my own time isn’t my idea of fun anymore, so I’m going to migrate Apetracks over to Typepad.
I attended a very interesting conference on OpenID recently. One theme that persisted across the presentations was the idea that it can be much more effective to use a variety of specialised online services rather than a single all-in-one provider. I’ve been singing the praises of ‘loose coupling’ and toolchains for a long time, and I think it’s time to apply this to my Internet services too. As well as moving my blogs to a commercial blog provider, and moving my mail to Fastmail.fm, and I’ve signed up with Slicehost to provide a VPS for messing about. DNS is already with the excellent Nettica It’s going to cost more than staying with Textdrive but hopefully I’ll get a lot more functionality for less effort, and not too much money.
Of course, I might regret this if the US dollar recovers…
