Change Your Site…

As Often As You Change Your Clothes—Part#1

As I mentioned in an earlier post on my old site, I’m in the process of transferring my blogging platform from TypePad’s hosted service to a WordPress site sitting on my own servers. This will save me a whole $9 per month, which, considering what my new mortgage payment is, is nice to have back in my pocket… But there was more to this platform change than putting a little more cash in my pocket…

For many years now I have had a couple of domains that relate to various aspects of my work and personal life. To exemplify the extent of my “brilliance” and “versatility” and to provide a place to highlight the various facets of what I do, I’ve plopped up a web page here and there and attempted to update it on a semi-regular basis. But, quite frankly, it was a pain in the a@# to make changes to, looked like garbage, and was as UN-dynamic as anything I’d ever done. I was also too cheap to pay someone to design a site for me. (I’m in the business man! I should be able to do this myself!) All of this did more to make my website highlight my stupidity and ineptitude rather than my brilliance, and it stroked my ego more than it promoted any of my endeavors.

In late 2003 Kathy and I were at the early stages of knocking down our old house and building a new one in the same location—great piece of property with a not so great house sitting on it—and during the project I wanted to accomplish a couple of task all at the same time.

1. I wanted to document our progress for my own sake. Having built houses for other people, I understood that you can lose some of the finer details of what’s taken place through the dust and refuse of demolition and rebuilding. I wanted to find some way to keep my memory of the job from getting a.) too rosy or b.) too dreary.
2. I live on the East Coast, my entire family lives on the West Coast. I wanted to be able to share what we were doing with my family so they could share in what we were doing.
3. A local newspaper was covering our progress, so I wanted readers to be able to get regular updates in between what was being printed in the paper.

At the same time that I was trying to find a way to accomplish my little “diarist’s” punchlist, Apple was giving .Mac users a shareware product for blogging. I downloaded it and immediately started a blog. Within three weeks, the shareware programmer made a change to his software that completely screwed up what I was doing, but I’d found the tool I needed to document my project. So I looked around on the web, found TypePad‘s hosted service, opened up an account, and went about the business of building my house and blogging the progress. It was a perfect solution.

to be continued…