a Voice in the Wilderness

After a recent crash of my home server, I am reconsidering the wisdom of hosting my own web stuff at home. This is the third server in just over 10 years that’s died on me. Each time I have most of the data available, but the server won’t complete the boot. Generally I can get the server back in operation (with a newer OS of course) in about a week of night’s and weekends. Since I’m not ghosting (or using vmware or xen or anything like that), I’ve got to locate new media, load the basic OS & then figure out how to get email and web working and the data restored.

This time the OS rebuild was easier thanks to Howtoforge’s perfect server recipe. I tried the ISPConfig at the end, but had some issues. It’s a long story.

ANYWAY, I decided to try exporting this blog from my home server and importing into a wordpress.com blog I have[2] The export and import couldn’t have been easier. One thing I noticed immediately missing was the blogroll. Must not have been part of the export. I found an updated version of the theme I’m using (and am not able to find online anymore - did WordPress get an exclusive?). So a lot of it looks identical. There’s a couple of plugins I use, and I need to find out if they are available in the free version of wordpress.com. One I just started to use is the wordpress flickr manager[4]. Don’t see that in wordpress.com. There is a sidebar, but adding an image isn’t as nice at wordpress.com as it is with Trent’s plugin.

Other Plugins I have loaded:
Akismet - likely handled by wordpress.com
Flickr Manager - sorta handled by wordpress.com
In Series - not included - wonder what happened to my posts in my series???
Scripturizer - not included - wonder what happened to my posts in my series???
WordPress.com Stats - included
WP-Amazon - not included - wonder what happened to my posts in my series???
WP-SlimStat - not a big deal, I don’t look at them often, and I can live with the WordPress.com Stats.

The other issue is that now I have two copies of the blog (except for this post), and keeping them in sync would be a pain. In order to completely redirect my original blog[5], wordpress.com requires payment via paypal.

I’m thinking that it may just be better to keep hosting it myself. Now what do I do with the snapshot that lives on wordpress.com?

Links in this article:
[1] http://www.howtoforge.com/perfect-server-opensuse11
[2] http://melick.wordpress.com
[3] MistyLook by Sadish (http://simpleinside.com/)
[4] http://tgardner.net/
[5] http://weblog.melick.net