I’m back online properly now.
I looked at free hosting but couldn’t find something that didn’t have restrictions I couldn’t live with. The best 2 alternatives I found had as limitations, “no .prc files” which is a problem because I want to serve AttnGrab.prc and “no hotlinking” which is a problem for my blog resources.
So I went for the next best thing, really cheap hosting through ServerGrade. They’re an Australian company but my web host is in the US because that’s cheaper. Whatever, I’m not particularly concerned about lag times. I signed up for the cheapest plan which is $24 per year. While I’m sure I could technically have got away without one, they wanted me to purchase a domain or point an existing domain to their servers. Since I don’t own a domain I got one through them for $15 a year. I’m told domains can be found cheaper but then I’d have to setup DNS myself and $40 for domain+hosting per year isn’t exactly going to bankrupt me.
So now ramsay.webhop.org redirects to yasmar.net and as before, some URLs redirect to blogspot pages (although this is now done properly, via 301 redirects rather than via meta-refresh because I have access to more low-level functionality).
After a big search-and-replace session, all of the blog resources are now loading properly again and I even went and cleaned up links in the blog contents. Turns out though there’s some links I broke a while back by removing stuff. Oh well, I guess these things happen.
One thing that’s new about my web hosting is that I have heaps of room (500MB, 50 times what I had before) and the ability to run things like perl and php. I had the option to do a one-click install of WordPress so I went ahead and did that. I’ve played with WP before but that was a long time ago. I’m not really sure if I want to move off of blogger at this point in time but I’m going to play with it anyway because it’s there. The static pages stuff it has is something I’ve long wanted for my blog (I currently set my “static” pages to the first day my blog existed so they are out of the way of my regular posts but I have to manually link these into the template ). I’ve got it setup on a subdomain, wp.yasmar.net using a dump I made from here just before this post. Only the content is there now. It’ll take me time to port my template, which is a finely-tuned masterpiece, devoid of the tag soup required to let Blogger do things to it automatically. I wonder if that will help or hinder my porting efforts?
The main reason to switch is to bring everything together on the one server (and to get static page management). The main reason not to switch is that I suddenly need to worry about backups of my blog (though you might argue I shouldn’t be trusting Google to keep reliable backups of my data now).
