For more than a year I’ve been thinking about redesigning the blog. I know, I know, I haven’t really blogged that much of late, but still, I’ve been giving it some thought.
Given that this is a not-for-profit venture that’s really more for me than anyone else–though I truly appreciate your patronage–I could not justify paying someone to do the redesign for me, though I have numerous friends I would love to have do it for me.
The redesign thought process had me examine my blogging platform as well. I’ve been with Movable Type for quite a while, nearly a decade. This blog is currently on version 4.2 of the software, with 5.1 on the cusp of release. Were I to stay with Movable Type, it would behoove me to upgrade, and take on the learning curve of the changes made with version 5.
WordPress, of course, is the hot ticket in the blogging world right now, and has an impressive and extensive theme ecosystem, making a redesign a theoretically simpler affair. My friend Tom has been using Tumblr for two years, and has been pretty happy with it, the service’s massive outage five months ago notwithstanding.
It was precisely Tumblr’s outage, and my Type A-control freak personality, which had me pushing Tumblr and similar service Posterous to the bottom of my choices.
Then there was the decision of export/import. Did I want to take nine years worth of Movable Type blog posts and import them into a new blogging system?
Conveniently, I had another domain name I could use. Since assuming the Retrophisch moniker, I’ve had the .net and .org domains pointing to the .com. About two years ago, I had the bright idea to seek out a shortened domain, one ending in .ch. This necessitated a visit to the Swiss registrar SWITCH, as at the time no U.S.-based registrar was offering Swiss domain purchases. In a matter of minutes, retrophis.ch was mine. It, too, went up as a redirect to the original retrophisch.com.
Now, I find myself with a domain different enough, yet still the same, I could simply “flip the switch” with: start over, with no importing. The old blog will reside as it always has, and go into archival mode.
So one part of the decision-making process was done. Now, back to the question of the engine, the content management system, or CMS, as it’s called. I ended up leaning toward Posterous, then Control-Freak Me decided on WordPress.
Only it was not to be: WordPress’ “famous five-minute install” went off without a hitch, but I kept running into a glitch with the setup. While Control-Freak Me was running this down, I-Just-Want-To-Post-Content Me was getting really annoyed, and went off exploring other options yet again.
Finally, I decided to move to Tumblr. Yes, there is a chance the service will go down again. Yet there’s just as much of a chance of a flash flood taking out my friend Jim’s server where this site resides. Stuff happens.
So from this moment forward, new stuff will be there, at Retrophis.ch. Point your browsers, and feed readers if that’s how you roll, there. This joint’s being boxed up and rolled off into the giant Internet storage warehouse.
Thanks for stopping by. Hope to see you over at the new digs.
Retrophisch