Making a few changes...

So, anybody who has been visiting this site for the last month or so is likely to have been a little confused with regards to just what is going on. I've made a number of changes to my online infrastructure, and it's taken me a little while to stabilise on a setup that I think I'm comfortable maintaining. But I've done so now, so hopefully from this point on you'll see a steady import of the old content to this new site, although it may take a while.

The starting point for all of this was my having to move house a little more than a fortnight ago. I decided that, after several years of it, I was starting to get sick and tired of the hassle involved in self-hosting (especially when moving time comes), and in fact I was starting to get sick and tired of doing everything computer-related "the hard way" for the sake of things like control, ideology and technological machismo (more on this in later posts). So before the move, I got a friend who owns a hosting company to set me up with some webspace and began the process of migrating everything across.

I only have FTP, not shell access to my new host, which necessitated a lot of significant changes to the way everything worked. Previously my website was powered by a self-written collection of hackish Python scripts to translate text files written in Markdown format into HTML files using Cheetah templates, and the blog was powered by my rudimentary own blogging engine Yomiko, a CherryPy application. Not only was getting all of this set up and operating on a new host without shell access impossible, I have to admit that the inconvenience and fragility of the system probably prevented me from writing anywhere near as much as I would if were more simple. So I ended up leaping from one extreme to the other and using, like everybody else, Wordpress for my new site. I've avoided using Wordpress in the past primarily out of a distaste for PHP and because the fact that it strictly requires the use of MySQL strikes me as extremely poor design (why not write everything in terms of a database abstraction layer so that people can choose to use PostgreSQL or SQLite if they prefer them?), but I have to admit that if you can get past all of that its a very quick and easy way to throw up a website. I don't think it will extend to handling the "Writing" part of my website, at least not very conveniently, so I may look at using a Wiki application for that, even though it will break visual consistency.

The biggest question mark still hovering over this whole setup is how I will go about porting my old blog posts into Wordpress. I would naturally very much like to avoid having to do this by manually copying, pasting and backdating everything, but without the ability to run scripts on the new host I'm not entirely sure how to go about this.

That's all for now. Hopefully all this decadent point-and-click WYSIWYG AJAX goodness will encourage me to start writing more frequently again.