Things are coming along. All the blogs are converted to WordPress and my switch to my new webhost, TextDrive.com is done. I’m taking this week to educate myself about WordPress and learn how to do some of the things I knew how to do with Movable Type. Some things are suprisingly easy to do (such as “edit” links for each post, which happens automatically and only displays to the author, when they’re logged in). Other things are suprisingly difficult to do (can I really not get a list of “recently commented” posts or an offset lists of posts without using a plugin?).
TextDrive is interesting. As a host, they seem rock solid, fast, and reliable. I was able to get shell access easily, and they even changed my shell to tcsh, with full access, something my old host wouldn’t do. Some things are kind of odd, though. For instance, the admin interface for web administration is terrible. They use WebMin, which is really just intended to be a GUI for Unix power-users, which doesn’t really include me. I can do everything, but I don’t know how to do any of it. Luckily, it turns out my needs are minimal. Another odd things is that the simple way they set up to do subdomains conflicts with the .htaccess mod_rewrite rules that WordPress relies heavily on. Lucky for me, one of the support guys was well-versed in this, and helped me find a solution. I’ve had to talk to support three times, and I’ve gotten speedy responses all three times. So far, I’m quite happy with them, and I’d recommend them.
I'm a 30-year-old 
Ha! Webmin is terrible only if you’ve never had to do all of that crap by hand. =)
But I will agree that it’s overkill for the end user who just wants to get their site up. Finding WHAT you need to change is the hard part. =)
February 23rd, 2005 at 6:53 am
Can you set up a block or something for an RSS feed? Then you could just display the RSS feed of your comments that way; same thing for your entries.
February 23rd, 2005 at 6:54 am
Down at the bottom of the page there’s already a link to an RSS2 feed for entries and another one for comments - or is that not what you mean?
February 23rd, 2005 at 11:17 am
Those are the feeds; could you use those somehow to recreate the offset list of posts, perhaps by creating a block or something? I don’t know the terminology that WordPress uses, but I can create blocks on my site from virtually anything…
February 23rd, 2005 at 5:42 pm
Hmm… I dunno, I’ll have to look into that next.
February 24th, 2005 at 12:42 am
Sig, regarding WebMin, I disagree with you. I’ve done some of this Unix stuff, and while I agree that in some respects WebMin is better than doing it by hand, a bad interface is still a bad interface. Just because this one is less bad than the original command-line interface doesn’t redeem it.
March 6th, 2005 at 11:58 pm