A new Apple Crumble

I’ve now moved over from my old web host to a blog hosted on the WordPress.com site.  I’d been thinking about making a change for a while after reading Rob Newman’s web page about moving to an eco-friendly web hosting company.  I had a bit of a browse around but I couldn’t really see anything that was aimed at someone who wanted webspace primarily for blogging – ie quite cheap and with some kind of guarantee that Movable Type would work.  I had problems a while back with my current host when I upgraded Movable Type in that certain Perl modules that I needed weren’t available – it took a few emails to convince them that any good web host would accomodate installing the module I required.

Having thought about it even more, I realised that I’ve not had that much time to blog recently and I started to question the value I was getting.  I’ve written around 250 posts since April 2004 so at £105 for a year’s posting it has cost me over £1 a post!  It’s not that I can’t afford it, but with a baby on the way I’ve started to think a lot more about the fact that what I’m spending is longer really my own money any more.  Expectant put it very well in his post back in November and it reflects exactly how I’m feeling.  A free blog seems like the answer to me.

My first thought was to head to TypePad, which is a hosted version of Movable Type – the blog software I am familiar with – but it turns out that you have to pay quite a bit for that as well so I wasn’t saving that much cash.  A little more delving revealed WordPress.com – a free host – and it has been surprisingly easy to migrate over to this site.  Yes, it’s a little more limited in that I don’t have complete control over the site (or the code…or what types of files I can post…) and yes it’s ugly (for now at least until I can grab some of Mat‘s time to help me with the CSS that is), but it is free, has good features built in and seems to have a very enthusiastic and honest company behind it. Ultimately it should just leave me to worry about writing entries and not all of the other gumpf that goes with running a website which will be no bad thing as my free time gets limited when the baby arrives.

I’ve spent quite a bit of time this week fixing images, links, documents etc and moving the videos over to YouTube (which hopefully doesn’t impact the integrity of the original posts).  If you find a problem, please leave a comment or email me about it!  Thanks.