I kick this year off by switching this domain to a different server. Same web host; just a different server. I was one of the first to sign up with TextDrive, and consequently one of the first on their servers.

Sadly, those early servers suffered a bit from overcrowding and general early illnesses. Since I’m one of the VC200s, the 200 people that invested 200 dollars each in TextDrive when it started up, I have a free account with them for the lifetime of the company — and I’ve certainly gotten my 200 dollars worth of web hosting a long time ago.

The early investors were offered a Golden Ticket to move to an equivalent account on newer, fresher servers, and my new account was just activated. In a few days I’ll start the move, beginning with a fresh WordPress install. I won’t just copy the entire account over; it’s a damn mess behind the scenes and I want a clean slate to work with.

There may be some downtime while the DNS switches over, but overall it should be a transparent change.

The ten entries currently on the front page stretch back a year. The entry before this one was written six months ago. That’s… not really a good update frequency. So for the last week or so I’ve been reconsidering the whole format for this site.

It’s easy for me to tell why I’m not writing more: there’s just not a whole lot of stuff going on in my life. I was way more active back when I was in school and actually did stuff.

So writing full-blown blog entries is a no-go in my current situation. I have, however, been quite active on Twitter lately. That’s a format that feels a lot more comfortable for me now — bite-sized observations condensed into less than 140 characters.

A week passes…

Yes. It’s now one week later. That’s how difficult it is for me to write something of substance right now. Those last two entries? Wrote them in the meanwhile. They were just a link and a short rant; that’s easy to manage.

Though I did just upgrade WordPress to the latest version and did some general maintenance on the nuts and bolts and got a brief spurt of creativity. At least I got something done on the site.

Another week passes…

Yep. Serious problems writing. And this isn’t exactly a format where I can just click “publish” without feeling that the entry is somewhat complete — blogging doesn’t lend itself to a disjointed thought stream spread out between unconnected entries.

In some vaguely related news, Dean Allen is writing again. And his latest entry mirrors my experience in a rather interesting way:

You’ll agree that everything deserves a second chance. A few months ago Twitter started slowly making sense.

I joined Twitter very early. Here is a graph of my usage — you’ll note the huge spike a few months back. That coincides with a forum thread about Twitter on the Penny Arcade forums.

A bunch of like-minded gaming nerds talking about Twitter and following each other rekindled my interest in Twitter, and it shows in that graph. Much easier to write for an audience.

Where to take it from here? I don’t really have much of an idea, right now I just want to get this damn entry done and click publish.

I have some half-baked plans about a new format that, though not intentionally, is essentially what Jason Kottke is doing with his site — a stream of short (though not of Twitter-length) entries mixed in with the longer stuff, maybe hook in my Twitter updates every now and then. We’ll see.

At any rate, even getting this brainfart-slash-rant down on virtual paper made my interest jump. While I do like the lovely MistyLook theme I’m currently using, I think I’ll make a theme of my own sometime soon. I can never really get used to other people’s style of writing CSS.

Now to see if cross-posting to Twitter when I write a new entry works. Here goes nothing!

About time I upgrade WordPress around here anyway. I need to move it out of the root folder and into /blog, which is where the archive is anyway.

And I should really get moving on redesigning here. And write more. Meh.

Some silly domain registrar, Domain Registry of America (who in the fine print state they are not affiliated with or endorsed by the government of the United States) wants me to host this very domain, and what a fancy name said domain has, at them instead of Gandi, my current registrar.

I would consider it if their yearly fee wasn’t 216% of what I’m paying right now. €26 per year? I pay €12 now. That pricing has no attachment whatsoever to reality.

And why does your spam look so much like a bill? Hidden deep in a paragraph you say that it isn’t, yet you do your best to make it look like one. Add some FUD about “losing your online identity” and I put you on my shit list.

Well, thanks for sending me something to light the fireplace with.

I’ll write more starting next week. Promise. I’m visiting Stockholm now, so I’m kinda busy here right now.

Also, I love Ruby on Rails. More on that later.

Update: Aha. I think I had an extra empty line in the list of blacklisted phrases, meaning any comment would match the blacklist. Should work now. Now to wade through the spam comments to see if any genuine comments got caught.

Good riddance, I say. I’m not a big fan of the “www” prefix in URLs.