dx4.org migration
by Elliot
My old host was a four-year-old Dell box attached to my home cablemodem, which obviously wasn't ideal. I was paying $20/month for a static IP from my ISP, and at some point I realized I could get a real virtual host for the same price. I'm now using Slicehost for all my hosting needs, which includes various apps in screen in addition to this site. Slicehost uses Xen-based virtual hosting, which they claim yields better performance than the UML-based VMs their competitors use. I don't have enough experience to evaluate their claims one way or the other, but so far I don't have any complaints.
My old blogging software was Geeklog, which was easy to set up and had a better security record than other PHP blogs. However, I wasn't able to devote much time to maintaining it and I kept running into problems, especially when I tried to upgrade to new versions.
For maintainability and security reasons, I wanted to move to an entirely static platform. That's the model that many professional CMSes use, including the excellent Cascade server I use at work. I eventually found blosxom, a perl-based weblog app that's nearly flexible enough to be a CMS in its own right. You write entries as regular text files, and blosxom turns them into HTML pages with appropriate indexes, links, etc. Many useful third party plugins exist, but many of them were written a while ago and are no longer easy to find. Notice, for instance, the blank "ARCHIVES" section to the right of this post.
