navelfluff :: March

I’m in the process of moving my blog to another server. Why this, when i’m on a perfectly swell, and free host right now?

It’s this: i like to tinker. I like to hack. I like to be able to destroy every single tool i’m using and be responsible for it. I like to be in control.

Blogsome is an excellent host if you like a free Wordpress blog with minimal hassle and really unobtrusive ads. Sure, you can tinker quite a bit with the settings and stuff, but you don’t get to really rip your Wordpress apart, and you certainly don’t get a shell account.

So that’s why i’m moving to NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

The moving itself is what is going to be tricky. Blogsome does not provide a service to back up your own blog. Supposedly, they’re afraid of leavers — like me. But this is an unhealthy approach, good Blogsome politicans. I now cannot wholeheartedly recommend Blogsome for anyone who might eventually grow out of hosted blogging. I can certainly recommend it to a person who only wants to blog, and maybe do some small tweaking here and there. But for the hacker-tinkerer-type, the best solution is probably to go somewhere where you can break things yourself. Like NearlyFreeSpeech.net.

Also, i cannot find a proper blog migration tool, though i’m sure sombody must have written one by now. Heck, it’s possible to post flickr-images to blogs automagically, from flickr, so why not a tool to migrate? I tried some Windows software (w.bloggar, Qumana) for offline blog authoring, but i couldn’t find an easy way to bulk-migrate everything from one place to another. There is a Perl module to support this, but for that, i would have to write a whole Perl script to get the thing done. And i don’t know enough Perl to fluently do that.

My new Wordpress certainly has a functionality to import material, i just wished the Wordpress at Blogsome would care to export…