This is completely “off topic” but worthy of a post.

You may have noticed that this blog has been moved off Google’s blogspot platform onto a blog running in WordPress.

I’ve never been particularly happy with blogspot. It largely works, but…

The big problem (by far) is the post editing control is just awful. Unspeakable bad, in fact. And I don’t even use it that much; I tend to write most of my posts on my phone, whilst traveling or at some other time when I’m not at a computer. I then paste in the plain text. Somehow I nearly always end up swearing and cursing at the HTML control because it completely messes up simple formatting, like bullet points. The WordPress control is not perfect, but it’s still loads better.

Also, viewing the content on a phone shows formatting oddities which do not show up when viewing it on a desktop. I have no idea how this is possible, but it is.

And basically because I wanted a change that would give me more control over the content I want to write that isn’t strictly to do with having a blog, I’ve moved to my own WordPress install running on my own domain that I’ve had for years but never really used.

Migrating the content, using a plugin, was pretty much painless. I have had to go around and massage some formatting though, but I blame Google’s HTML editor for that.

This site is running on an OVH (free link for them) virtual host. It is their bottom of the line VM with 1 core and 2GB of RAM, but it appears to work well enough for this simple blog. The cost of that VM is around £45 per year, which I think is pretty reasonable. So far it is only running this blog’s software. I will continue to make use of Google’s G-Suite for the thing it is great at, namely email. Whilst it’s vaguely tempting, I’ve no interest in running my own MTA anymore; the deluge of spam makes it impossible, which is sad as running an MTA is kind of cool.

The certificate, which cost $8.95 for a year, was bought from Comodo (another free link for those guys). I know you can get SSL certificates for free, but they all seem to require software to be installed on the server, which is a complication I don’t want to deal with. While it’s not essential, the SSL certificate gives the site an air of modernity. Which is odd since this blog is almost entirely about retro computing.

I’m sure I’ll play about with the WordPress theme a bit, and I will look at making content outside of the blog. One of the things I want to make is proper write-up of MAXI09, so readers can learn about it without reading through a sequence of blog posts.

Normal posts will resume soon…