Monday - March 15, 2010

Backing a Loser

Sometimes I go with a less prominent or popular method of doing things.  I like doing things my way and most commercial products tend to over simplify.  For instance, when I moved to Austin back in 1997, I decided to quit my mother.com ISP from California because phone modems were still the norm and the long distance modem charge back to Sacramento would have been prohibitively expensive.  I looked for a local ISP and found realtime.net.  I liked them because they were one of the few out there that let me play in the UNIX shell and do TELNET.  I was able to check my personal email from work or from any computer capable of accessing the internet long before browser based email was available.  I was also able to do other UNIX tricks.  

Realtime has been bought and sold and there have been some very minor challenges as the server I was hosted on aged and the new company made some changes in migrating me to a new server, but over all I have been very pleased with my ISP.  I don't touch any UNIX stuff anymore, but I still like my small ISP.  It had the nice feature of not being noticed for a long time by DoD network nannies and I was able to check my email from military computers while overseas when anyone using hotmail or AOL was SOL.

So sometimes backing the dark horse works out well. 

But sometimes it doesn't.  Years ago when my blog started getting bigger and I learned that they made a name for what I was doing on my website (blogging) I found iBlog.  It was designed for a mac and at the time it was state of the art.  I could use my own ISP to host the blog, giving me complete control over what I was doing.  It also had some java scripts and other theme scripts that I was able to massively customize to my own liking.  I enjoyed the scripting challenges and iBlog served me quite well.

Until they created version 2, that is.  Right before completing version 2, it appears the company has either folded or just stopped doing anything.  Version 2 had a lot of promise and is still better than version 1, and the migration to version 2 was exceedingly painful.  But I kept at it and finally figured it out.

Now, I have a new problem.  I have a new computer.  I want to transfer my blog files to the new computer, but there seems to be something keeping the new computer from seeing the files.  Maybe I can figure it out eventually but so far I don't even see a possibility of figuring it out.  I can either migrate to a new piece of software or just run the blog from my old computer.

Either way, I'm quite discouraged.  It took a lot of work to customize my blog to look the way I like it.  It could stand for some improvements, but generally I'm pleased.  I am not looking forward to a painful migration to another software solution.  Most seem to recommend WordPress, though I don't know anything about it.  In any event, I'm looking at a massive investment in time to switch.  Perhaps just keeping running off of the old computer will be the best solution.

So, sometimes going with the off beat answer is not so good.  It looks like I've backed a loser with iBlog. What a pity.  It had a lot of promise.

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