shooshee

Since considering, I’ve been doing a little more research, and found…

WordPress 2.5 released.
and BlueHost is no bueno.

on tumbling…
I’ve pretty much decided that I am far too verbose to rely entirely on a tumblelog for the meat of everything. I’ve been playing a bit with tumblr - mainly just seeing how it handles RSS feeds. And well, it handles them but things do get out of order when it pulls in a big feed dump hourly. I DO like that I can email a quick thought to the blog - with the plan that I am on for my iphone, email is way cheaper than sms.

Either way, I’m pretty sure that it will make sense to have a tumbled portion - I am trying to decide what bits would be best tumbled in whatever I end up building. I may play with tumblr a bit more and just embed it (since it’s already hosted) or better yet, I may play with chyrp for the tumblelog portion. I’ve heard okay things about it so far from other people that have been playing.

chyrp feedback I received: “I’ve been *this* close to embracing it, but have yet to do much with it. The functionality and add ons are fantastic, but the development community is fairly small. That, and it isn’t quite as flexible as I’d like it to be design wise. Figuring out where to put my templates and CSS code isn’t at all intuitive. Then again, that might be because I’ve spent so much time with Movable Type. Still, I’m planning to mess with it a bit more and might relaunch my site with it. At the very least, it’s worth playing with.”

on micro-blogging…
Yep, I’ll more than likely stick with twitter. I was reluctant to adopt it for a long time, because it just seemed silly, at best. 140 characters to talk about the cheese sandwich I had between longer blog posts about cheese sandwiches? Wha? It proved more useful than dodgeball during sxsw and certainly less annoying. Pre- and post-sxsw, it has been nice to keep up with the little nuances of my friend’s lives. Still don’t get twitter? Watch Twitter in Plain English.

reminders about comments…
On vox, there are some “barriers to entry” - people who don’t have a vox account generally don’t comment. Way back when I did blog, I remember what an annoyance comment spam was. It’s gotten better - well the tools have gotten better for filtering/moderating, but I’ll certainly moderate. I’m all for free speech, but my webspace is not necessarily your webspace for having that voice. It’s sad but true that not everyone will follow the Blogger’s Code of Conduct. There will always be trolls. There will always be assholes that are assholes just for the sake of being an asshole or because it’s so easy to hide behind anonymity. I have to delete comments frequently on flickr. Although, disemvoweling is an interesting method, just one that boingboing deals with moderation.

on content management…
I’ve been looking through the list of free and open source cms software and it can be a tad overwhelming. There are so many now. But I am really leaning towards this latest release of WordPress - WordPress 2.5 - for many reasons including the “comfort zone” aspect. It’s familiar and there is a strong community around it so help is a click away. I want control over things, but I don’t want to eff with it so much that it gets in the way of the creative process. After all, any new web presence I create right now is geared towards being a digital sandbox and not an electronic resume.

on hosting…
So narrowing it down to wp, I can take a more targeted look at hosting providers. Just yesterday someone told me to look into BlueHost’s censorship. Wow. And yes, right there in the TOS for BlueHost (aka Hostmonster and Fastdomain) the third bullet point down states: “Foul language and profanity in the site content, and in the domain name are prohibited.” Fuck that, I say. I do enjoy dropping the f-bomb and don’t want my site to be shut down if I choose to do so.

I don’t want to research this to death really. I’ve heard not so good stuff about DreamHost and I’ve also heard that some people are really happy with it. Right now though, with a wordpress 2.5 auto-installer, 1TB of disk space and 10TB bandwidth for $7.95 a month with a 12 month pre-pay? I’m leaning almost to the point of falling over towards DreamHost right now. But AN Hosting has a pretty tempting deal as well. And so does HostICan… Unless you can point me to another better deal dear readers.

So now that I am nearer to making decisions, I need to get off my ass and do something about it. We’ll see how long that takes…