After a good year or so it’s time to say goodbye to our good ol’ host twoday.net. Like, you know, we’ve had good times and all, but, you know, it’s just time to go separate ways… Just kidding. Nope, lately there were plenty down times, and our free account there was basically maxed out. On the other hand, twoday’s pro accounts aren’t that cool either, so we decided it’s time to move out and get some place on our own. Which is where you are now.
So what does this mean?
First of all, we changed the name of this weblog. GMT plus nine no longer. The name derived, at least to some degree, from when I was living in Australia, which I don’t anymore. On the other hand, the stats show that plenty of people google for info on time zones, and when they land on this site they have to deal with all this stuff. Anyway, to stop the confusion and to move on, and because we obviously like waving cats, I hereby solemnly declare this weblog re-booted by the name of The Waving Cat. Tadaa.
Second, it means we’re on a new technical platform. Non-nerds, skip this paragraph: Geek-talk ahead. The first decision obviously is hosted vs self-hosted. As we decided to leave our old host, moving to another one didn’t exactly make sense. We wanted to get a place on our own where we can play till late without someone telling us to go to sleep. (Uhm, wait, that was something different.) Anyway, there is one host I’m really fond of: Antville. They stopped giving out new accounts ca 2002. Although I have one, I picked a stupid subdomain at the time and it’s not possible to change it anymore. So getting a hosted service wasn’t an option. That said, we had a closer look at the available tools. It turned out that the first go (b2evolution) had quite some weaknesses and was generally quite a pain to set up correctly – one out. Moveabletype was the next in line, but depending on the version you’re stuck with just one author – and out. I briefly considered Drupal, too. But then I remembered helping to set up a weblog on Drupal a few years ago. Let’s just say it didn’t stay on Drupal for long, so here goes No 3. Unblogbar pointed me to WordPress, which so far has been exceeding all my expectations both in installation and usability. (There was one minor problem with importing our old posts, but I’m afraid that was due to our old platform’s export rather than WP’s import…) The winner is: WordPress.
Third, I’ll be hacking a new skin, plug-ins, blogrolls and all over the next couple of days. So please bear with us while we tweak the system and get our stuff together.
We’d like to hear from you. Why don’t you drop us a line with your ideas, critique and general feedback? (Our new email address is weblog.thewavingcat at gmail.com)
