Weddings and Ramblings

Ok, todays posts will be a 5% techy. After migrating my blog, I realised a few things.
1) I haven’t posted a blog entry for a few months.
2) I still need to restore the rest of my missing photos.

Anyway, for those who just stumbled into my blog, I’ve just migrated to this new location. My old blog was at http://darrelchia.blogspot.com . This was hosted by blogger/blogspot. After using it for a few months (until the last saturday actually) everything was fine. Until I realised that I probably needed to categorise my blogs … after all, I write about technology, photography and my ramblings, and guess what ? *arrrggghhhhh* blogspot doesn’t support categories / tagging.

So the first option I looked at was a hack that would put categories on my blog. There are about 2-3 known workarounds, which involved using multiple blogs, using an external site (delicious, technorati), or some wierd configurations in blogspot. I found all these easy to adapt, but inconvenient to use at all. So the final solution was to migrate.

My requirements were simple. First, is, tagging/categorisation. Second, customisable templates/cascading style sheets. Third, easy to migrate over from my existing blog.
Basically, I spent a day looking through various blog hosts sites and here’s what I gathered.

1) Blogspot.com – No categories / tagging. Doesn’t allow javascript to be embedded in template body.
2) Blogsome.com – I didn’t find any mechanism to support easy migration.
3) Livejournal.com – Template limitations (unless you pay).
4) Wordpress.com – Template limitations, plus I can’t embed javascript codes in. These guys are security conscious.
5) Xanga.com – Ads! arrghhh *major turnoff*

The final decision that I made was …. to put blog on my own domain. I installed wordpress (which is already available as part of my web host’s installable applications). To explain a bit, wordpress is a blog server software that you can install in your web host to run your own blog. Another notable mention is MovableType. Blogger/Blogspot, blogsome, wordpress.com all run off the wordpress blogging software, while livejournal (as well as a few others) runs off MovableType.

Using my own wordpress gives me lots of flexibility over my blog now. I can change templates, install widgets, plugins AND modify the source codes myself. The tagboard in the sidebar is a wordpress widget (which current blog providers don’t allow you to install).

Anyway, it was a pretty short search, and I’m happy here. Although some people have told me that the loading is a bit slow.

Tagged: ramblings, tech