New Fun Blog – Scott Bilas

Time for the blog to move yet again. But hopefully nobody will notice! I’m moving off WordPress.com and on to my own hosted site at BlueHost. I have heard great things about them from friends (thanks guys), so it’s time to give it a go.

And after playing around on BlueHost for a bit, I realized how insanely out of touch I have been with the low-end web hosting world. It’s cheap as hell to host your stuff, and they give you ridiculous amounts of resources and free software to pile on.

Why was I putting up with a pile of disconnected free sites?

Stuff involved in the move:

• My scottbilas.com will point at the new site, so nothing should appear to change on the outside, especially RSS readers.
• Bye-bye old Blogger account (scottbilas.blogger.com). It’s been a year and a half since I moved to WordPress and there’s no reason to keep it around any more.
• All the stuff on Google Pages is going to be moving (*). Well, that was a bad experiment.
• I’m finally going to move my really old stuff off of Drizzle. I’ve had that site on $5/month life support for a long time now. I know, ridiculous, just to host a few pages. But I’ve had Drizzle since ‘96, and it’s hard to give them up. End of July I say goodbye!

Incidentally, the email I just got from Google saying they’re shutting down Google Pages is what finally got my ass in gear. They’re migrating it to Google Sites, which I assume is what happened to the JotSpot they bought years ago. But it turns out that I have some files (they don’t say which) that won’t migrate over and will be lost.

Well, screw all of that.

This isn’t the first time some free site has shut down and I’ve had to scramble. With a hosted site, I control everything myself. And as a fun bonus I’ll get to use WordPress plugins that their free hosted site doesn’t support.

Please welcome me to the 21st century.

Now, I have to research whether to use WordPress ‘pages’ for my publications and so on, or if I should install Drupal. I’m thinking…WordPress. I love them.