Random thoughts on changing web platforms and blogging

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I’m back writing on my blog after 2 1/2 weeks break. For the first time ever for my personal blog, I’m using a WordPress interface.

I’ve used several platforms for my blog since I launched in 2002, with the last three years on an increasingly dated version of Movable Type.

So over the holirday period I bit the bullet on technology on several fronts:
* We moved my blog, including over 1,000 posts since 2002, onto WordPress. We currently have 4 Movable Type and 8 or so Worsdpress sites, and are starting to shift to to WordPress only.
* We migrated all the blog comments from Movable Type to Disqus which will be the commenting platform from now.
* We shifted my web host from Media Temple to Rackspace, moving 20 or so websites including blogs, companies, books, events, forums and more.
* We moved all our email over to Google Apps.
* We are about to start using Zoho Projects, having paid for and barely used Basecamp for two years.

I’ll hope to get back later to say a bit more about the reasons for all this. But for now I though I’d share just a few prominent thoughts about the experience.

While I’ve personally used WordPress a fair bit, I am far more used to the Movable Type interface. One of the biggest reasons to move over to Movable Type is the ease of tapping a universe of plugins – or even making your own. You have a high degree of control. On the other hand the WordPress text input process is not good – it can be unresponsive, ugly, and frustrating. Just positioning the cursor ican be an ordeal.

The frustrations of a new interface will no doubt abate as I use it more, but for now I need to adjust my blogging process. It is not as easy as it should be.

At the same time I am learning more than I want to know about web hosting including memory requirements and optimization, however it has come time for us to switch our web host from Media Temple. The overrun of WordPress exploits across their grid server over the last months was the last straw – it is in any case time to move to a Virtual Private Server and Rackspace has been chosen. No real experience of it yet – our first site transfer was last night.

Right now my computer is running slow, presumably because Google Apps Migration for Outlook Sync is in process. With 84,000 emails to import, it looks like it may take over 2 days to do. I will definitely have more to say about Google Apps. I am a bit disappointed with its maturity, though it is basically solid.

Anyway, it’s good to be back in blog-land. One of my aspirations this year is to spend more time writing on my blog.

The last few months of last year it felt as if my blog was becoming a core activity for me, meaning I needed to carve out the time to do it from a very busy schedule. It’s easy at any particular point in time to think that there are more important things to do than blog. But blogging is both fun and important.

As the business model across our companies crystallizes, my personal blog is a place where I can point to some of the interesting things we have going on, such as our Newspaper Extinction Timeline, ExaTrends of the Decade, Future of Crowdsourcing Summit, iPad Media Strategy framework, and so on. We will be generating lots more interesting content soon, which is one reason I’ll make sure I carve out time for blogging.

But I also want to share what we are experiencing as we build our businesses, the useful things we learn along the way. Part of that is on tech platforms. I don’t want to be a deep geek, but I do want to make the right decisions on what platforms we use. The technology foundations of a business. I’ll share some deeper reflections later on what we are finding useful for us.

Back soon.