/karen/

A short one. (For once.)

Monday, 17 March, 2008

So I've been trying to change hosting. I've been trying to change for a while. After all, we signed up and paid for this whiz-bang hosting that offers us oodles of space and stacks of special features and multi-domain management, etc. etc. and it's just sitting there waiting to be used. And I figure we ought to be using it. (Well, Ben's already using it but that's another story ...) But me not being much of a web geek and having never done this sort of thing before on my own, it's been a little tricky. I spent one very long and frustrating weekend trying to install Movable Type 4.1 on the server and I was unsuccessful, so that meant a total change of plan. Ben had always been keen on using Expression Engine for Hippocampus Extensions, and that was, in fact, one of the reasons why we bought hosting, so it seemed logical to switch content management systems and use that. The problem is, you can't learn EE in a weekend. It took Ben four or five months! Did I mention I'm not a web geek? (Well, I may be a bit geekier than you but I'm certainly not as geeky as some!)

So anyway I've been spending the last three weeks trying to get my head around EE and have been annoying Ben majorly in the process. I have to say, I'm very impressed with EE (even though it does some things which are just maddening and I think, “Why can't you just do it like Movable Type???”). I've managed to import all entries and comments from this blog and set it up with individual archives, category archives, drop-down menus, a search box, static pages and everything! But of course my little blog is just one very small part of the behemoth that is Hippocampus Extensions. There are parts of this domain that I have no idea about.

So given that this transfer thingy is going to be a long and rather painful process (as I continue to work my brain around EE's little quirks), I figure why should the blog stop? Why let host transferral turn into one big heap of writers' block the way it, you could say, has for some people who still haven't launched their new and improved blog? I'll just double post. I still get my creative outlet, you still get to put up with me, the people who only read this through their RSS reader can stay in touch with what's going on, and when I can finally flick the switch and point the Hippo to its new Campus, the transition will have been more or less seamless.

Well, almost. You'll notice I've made a few cosmetic changes—the major one being you can't comment. I can talk to you but you can't talk to me (well, not through this blog anyway). You'd only be commenting into Movable Type, and Movable Type's days are numbered. You also can't search my blog or look at my archives (unless you're clever). Hmm ... seems like we're both in for a very one-sided conversation ...

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