We’ve made this change mostly for economic reasons. We were each paying $25 a month to host two blogs each at LW — for Jen, that was Last Night’s Dinner and jenblossom.com, and for me, that was A Dash of Bitters and this blog. (This does not count the money we pay Dotster to provide the four domain names.)

Now, WP is hosting each blog for free. For $13/year, WP will provide domain-mapping services for each blog. Additionally, I pay $30/year for the Custom Design upgrade for ADOB, since I’m hoping to actively blog there again, and the custom design allows me greater flexibility.

So, $25 x 2 x 12 = $600/year to host four blogs at Liquid Web. Despite the ads I ran on ADOB, I never got much revenue, so very little of that money came back to us.

By contrast, ($13 x 4) + 30 = $82/year to host four blogs at WP.com, map the domains, and add custom design options for ADOB. (Remember, the hosting is free.)

On top of the savings, I now no longer have to upgrade WP every time new versions come out, nor do I have to upgrade plugins, themes, etc. Twice, WP has issued upgrades that required me to ask Liquid Web to move our hosting to servers that support the latest version of PHP. That? Is kind of a hassle.

I’ve always been satisfied with LW’s level of support and its uptime. This move isn’t about Liquid Web. It’s about our bank account and the fact that we have a kid now and need the $518 we’ll save.

Incidentally, if you’re not following along, Jen and I each now have a third blog, each of which is also hosted and domain-mapped by WP. I think each blog, hosted at LW, would have meant an additional $5/month, or $60/year (times two, of course, which means $120/year). Here, it’s the same $13/year for domain-mapping, so an additional $26.

So the bill at LW for three blogs each would have run to $720/year. At WP, it’s $108/year. I think $720/year is a lot to pay for hobbies that don’t bring in much income. But $108/year? That sounds reasonable to me.

Oh, those new blogs? Mine is Daddy’s Whiskey, and Jen’s is Feeding Julian. If you read this blog (and I think there are exactly two of you now, both named Chris) and you don’t read those, please do. Mine is a daddy blog, updated sporadically, and Jen’s is all about our food choices for Julian, our seven-month-old son.

Jen will probably update jenblossom.com at the rare times she feels the need to opine about personal matters, as she’s done there for a couple of years now. Her LND blog will live on as an archive. She may from time to time update it with new content, but her focus right now is no longer on creatively cooking each night, but just keeping the three of us nourished. (That’s not to say we aren’t creatively cooking, it’s just to say there’s no time to write about it.)

I want to get michaeldietsch.com active again — probably on the same topics that have held my interest throughout its lifespan: books, word geekery, and writing; BBQ and grilling; the science of evolution; filthy godlessness; NYC; and science.

I’ve held this blog down for nearly 12 years now, and I’d like to keep it going. But right now, everything else is more important. And once we move, I hope to have more time to pursue outside writing opportunities, so this place may suffer even more. But I want it to stay alive.

I’ll eventually update the main index page at michaeldietsch.com to be a portal to this site, to the Bitters blog, and to a couple of other places where I knock about. The archives of the MT site will probably remain live unless I get ambitious enough to redirect those links to the corresponding WP pages.

I prefer WP so much over MT that I’m hoping to actually start writing here again with some greater regularity. That’s assuming anyone’s still reading.

I had to downgrade back to MT 3.2 to get this thing going again. And good luck finding it anywhere. I had to Google mt-3.2.zip and download it off some random person’s web directory.

I mean, really. I first installed MT3.3 over the top of my 3.2 install. Okay, it’s no surprise that didn’t work. But even a fresh install didn’t work. Believe me, I tried everything I could.

It’s frustrating. I can usually get a new version of MT to work. It’s NEVER easy, for fuck’s sake, but I can usually work it out. But 3.3 completely stymied me, and I no longer have the time or patience to fuck with it. Why spend hours and hours on every new version? Seriously? Yay for the MT nerds who live for this or have nothing better to do, and BIGGER YAY for me that I’m not among them.

I know that 6A is aiming MT at the enterprise crowd, and pointing the nontechies at LiveJournal, TypePad, and Vox. But they still don’t have a solution I like for hosting something in my own space. But, Christ, with 6A, you’re either a novice or a programmer. There’s no room for someone like me in their plan.

Sigh.

Next step is exporting my archives and installing WordPress to run this blog. I’m finished with Movable Type.

I still like LJ and Vox, so as much as I’d love to tell 6A to piss off, I can’t quite. But. Fuck MT.

On the plus side, I have some ideas how to integrate this site’s design with that of adashofbitters.com, if they’re both on WP, so that’s cool anyway.

I guess I didn’t really fuck it up. After all, my archives weren’t nuked and I can still post. But lots and lots and lots of shit are really broken, and I don’t think I can fix them.

Sigh.

Fuck off, Movable Type.

It’ll be especially helpful if you leave comments since I want to play around with the Community features in 3.2. If you have a TypeKey ID, try posting comments both with and without it. If you don’t know what I mean, don’t sweat it.

Don’t worry about the design on the test blog. I’m just using the default MT templates (which, admittedly, are much, much nicer than the old defaults), and I’ll be using my own design after I upgrade this blog.

Okay, thanks.

Aside: If LoSH means Legion of Super Heroes, what do you think JoSH means? Jugs of Super Heroines? Jumbled, or Short Handed? Gimme yer thoughts.

[links: Laugh Stupid]

Tomorrow, after I get paid, I’ll start the process of switching hosts. If things go weird here for a while, that’s why.

I’ve also added geographic metadata to the main page of this site. It looks like this:

I used the information for Bushwick provided by the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names. As far as I can tell, those coordinates actually put you in Bed-Stuy rather than Bushwick, but to most of the world, it’s all the same anyway.

Finally, I cleaned up a few in-site navigation links that were broken.