many miles

Starting over .. again! .. with the blog that is. I’ve decided that I no longer want to self-host my blog. The main reason is that I focus more on writing and spend less time futzing with the site infrastructure. After all, building and maintaining websites is my “day job” and I don’t really feel the need to spend even more hours coding.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I still love digging into some serious code. My “old” site was based on Drupal v6, and, with v7 finally available, it’s due for an upgrade. My alter ego is running a few more Drupal sites, and while those will be upgraded, “many-miles.com” will be migrated.

I looked at several platforms (including Tumblr, Blogger, and Posterous), but decided that a hosted WordPress site would be a better fit for this blog. The comparison wasn’t very scientific, but the main criteria were:

• advanced feature set, without getting in the way of writing
• easily customizable and extensible
• support for comments, something that Tumblr, for example, doesn’t support
• support for iPhone blogging tools, something that most platforms have today
• support for custom URLs, which WordPress offers as a premium service

Again, this is not meant to be a detailed technical side-by-side. Rather it’s a list of criteria that are important to me.

Now, there is one more change to “many-miles.com” .. my posts will focus more on social issues and will be tied more closely (at least in theme) to my tweets. There is a lot going on in our world and I often feel the need to vent/rant.

That’s it for now!