Here and There
Here and There
For the moment I am still simul-blogging on both the http://DeanLand@buzzword.com (formerly weblogs.com) site and on the fauxblog my son set up for me: http://www.land-com.net/deanland/.
This represents a few things. First is my desire to ake the blog available and easily clicked-to, whether one goes to the old deanland.weblogs.com address, now redirected to the buzzword.com URL, or to the fauxblog address. My son the smart one worked that out so a few addresses actually all end up in the fauxblog spot. Wise, eh? Bottom line, one gets to read the same entry no matter where one clicks.
Second is my desire to see what's out there, and in the interim maintain a steady offering and easily located blog. Or, should I say, couple of [identical] blogs.
I like what I see so far at buzzword.com. Rogers Cadenhead is open, discursive, reacts to questions and comments, and seems quite eager to make the transition as workable and seamless as can be.
It is surprising not to have seen much in the way of contact or proposals for transition from weblogger.com or ideaforest.net. One can find their offers to those formerly hosted at weblogs.com on their sites, but otherwise there is little or no buzz or communication, or any manner of dsitributing the data or contacting weblogs.com users.
Had Dave Winer not mentioned them on the transition page, there might be no way of knowing of their availability. EditHere.com offers Manila hosting, and also listed a variety of commercial providers hosting Manila blogs.
I was also surprised to see almost nothing from Nelson, the New Zealander web marketers who were offering Manila freebies much as Dave and Userland did with weblogs.com.
For the record, it should be noted that Nelson ceased their freebie service some time ago, cutting off my daughter's old Manila blog with no notice, no backup offer, nor any communication whatsoever. And in doing so they chased her right over to LiveJournal.
And, also for the record, I have received the backups of this blog, DeanOnBaseball and Elias's personal blog, EliasLand. All delivered as promised, actually a little earlier than anticipated, with no problems. Well, Rogers had to tell me it was necessary to log in, in order to do the download, but that was more of a pointer than a problem. And he was prompt --hell, FAST!- in getting that info to me.
The good folks at Bloglines (one of my two aggregators of choice, the other being FeedDemon) also provided a backup of my blog, free of charge and as a courtesy. So thanks to Bloglines, and also happy birthday to them, one year old and growing.
At the moment I am giving consideration to a variety of possibilities. I own a number of domains, many of them dormant, one with a catchy name that would be a cool place to put the blog. I like the service concept, which I received from weblogs.com and UserLand, and am seeing from Buzzword.com -- after all, a non-technical guy needs somne help from time to time, right?
Last week I was counseling a friend on choices of blog software that would serve some very specific needs, and surprised myself by pointing to more blogs using Movable Type than any of the other choices.
There's another blog I have, more of a business blog than here, on which I tried out pMachine. We are considering moving that one over to WordPress, and are also looking at Bloxsom. Drupal is another possibility.
There are numerous choices, and the blogging software is more of a choice based on comfort, ease of use, familiarity, and availability of automatic feeds (RSS and/or Atom, preferably both), and automatic (and user-defined) per-item permalink generation.
I am open to suggestion, discussion, and thoughts not necessarily brought up in this discussion, but that you might consider germaine.
