andydidyk.com

I’ve been MIA lately, and with what is clearly becoming a pattern of very poor netiquette, I neglected to tell anyone.

The truth is, I’ve been switching hosting providers, and I’ve also been converting our family blog from a Blogger format to WordPress.  Let me tell you, neither process has been easy, painless, or fun.  But at least it’s finished (mostly).

I’ll offer this to anyone considering using WordPress to power their blog – it’s by far the most versatile, expandable, and customizable platform available.   And, it’s free.  However, you’d better be prepared to get your hands dirty in the code once you start wanting it to do some very specific things – like be able to handle extremely large image uploads.

And please, save yourself some frustration and do your homework when it comes to choosing a shared hosting provider.  I had been using 1and1 hosting, chiefly because they seemed to offer the most for your money and they advertise very heavily in trade publications.   However, if you ever intend to have any appreciable degree of traffic on your site, or plan on uploading or manipulating large files or images (think over 2MB), it’s a terrible choice.  1and1 has draconian server limitations for their shared hosting accounts, such as not being able to use a server process that requires more than 16MB of RAM.  I didn’t care about this until I selected a WordPress template for my family blog that I wanted to upload images to that were 8 megapixels (about 5MB) in size – then WordPress just crashed and burned.  Not to mention the fact that a ton of WordPress features simply don’t work within the 1and1 hosting environment.

I can highly recommend (and indeed, so does WordPress) bluehost.com for all of your shared hosting needs.  They don’t have dedicated hosting options, so if you end up with a massive spike in traffic you’ll have to change hosting providers, but their service is outstanding (phone calls answered by a real person, live chat sessions started within a minute of clicking on the button, etc.), and they only run about $7 a month.  I’ve been very happy so far.

So enough complaining.   I’ve successfully moved both blogs and have learned a ton in the process.  Now  I just need to figure out how to get rid of the strange characters that got inserted everywhere on this blog after the move.  And then back to posting more content.  The funny thing about bad netiquitte is that when you stop posting, it’s not like people complain or anything.  They simply stop visiting your site and they vote with thier visits.  The good thing is that you can easily resurrect your site with fresh content at any time, and the rewards of writing are worthy of my time even without substantial traffic.  Thanks everyone for reading!

UPDATE:

Success!  This is why I love WordPress.  The problem I had in moving my database is that everytime I had a double space on this blog, it somehow converted the double space to this character – Â.  After a painless search and installation of a simple plugin (aptly named Search and Replace), I was able to replace all 516 instances of  with the double space.  Everything was fixed in less than two minutes.  Sweet!  That’s a lot better than waiting for a tech support email from Google (owner of Blogger) to solve a similar problem I had a while back.