FINAL POST: CWOB.COM is becoming IHNATKO.COM! Change bookmarks!

Friday, January 04, 2008 • 07:17:33 PM EST

I'll cut to the chase: the blog is moving! Go to IHNATKO.COM for your future CWOB needs. There you'll also find a new set of RSS feeds, so you'll need to change your Bloglines, Google Reader, etc. subscriptions.

The longer version:

It's a bad news/good news/bad news situation, longtime Yellowtext readers and sensation-seekers. The bad news is — well, you already know damned well: I haven't updated this blog in months.

The good news is that I haven't been idle. You know how I'd been promising to switch from my homebrew blogging software to something with significantly greater market share? I wasn't whistling dixie. I spent 2007 testing all kinds of different bloggers and content management systems. I'd install the software, set up a test blog, and then I'd write sample posts and designs and code for it until something made me move on to the next software solution.

Usually, this "something" was an urge to throw an expensive object into or through a stationary object. CWOBber has its downsides, yes, but it's never cause me to re-evaluate my hitherto bedrock conviction that trapping a software developer's neck in some sort of clamp and then throwing rotting fish at their head for an hour is really no way to deal with one's feelings of disappointment.

I think Wordpress was my third system, after Drupal (intensely powerful, but only intended for folks with serious web development credentials) and MovableType (nice, but it felt merely "adequate").

Wordpress truly got me excited about building a new site. If you just want to turn the key and go, no problem: you're up and blogging in minutes. And when you want to make improvements to either the blog's appearance or its infrastructure, it's never a big deal. My first impulse was to rock a little PHP or Java, and I was pleased to find that access to all of the templates is just a click or two away, but I quickly came to appreciate that whatever it is you're planning, someone's gotten there ahead of you and built it as a plug-in or a widget.

For all that, a major update was released in 2007 that turned WP into an elegant hybrid between simple turnkey blogging systems and systems like Drupal. I can't tell you where I'm going with this new site — honest, I don't even know — but I do know that if next year it makes sense to evolve it into a true destination and a community, I'll be able to get the job done without ripping the thing down to its foundations.

I've come to appreciate that a good, working site can't be designed. It can only be grown organically. And that's another one of Wordpress' great strengths. The only decision you absolutely must make ahead of time is "I would like to start a blog or something," which seems like an altogether reasonable thing to expect from a designer or user.

But after that, WP really lets you work at your own pace. I didn't like the initial template, so I searched around and downloaded one I like better. I started to dislike some of that template's elements, so I slowly started modding its style sheets. And now I'm slowly building a brand new template from scratch, now that I better understand how all of the gears and shafts mesh together.

Step by step, Wordpress simply shrugs and lets me make my changes. Good lad. If you ever divorce your spouse and force your kid to suffer through a series of "special friends," I hope you're blessed with a kid with a personality like Wordpress. The alternative blogging apps would more likely react to these seemingly impulsive but fundamental shifts in a way that causes neighborhood cats to suspiciously start disappearing.

Back to the story. The funny thing is that the "test" Wordpress blog quickly and quietly became my "real" blog. I'd stashed it under "ihnatko.com," a domain that I'd purchased years ago just to keep it off the field of play. There have been days when I couldn't spell that name correctly; it seemed to be a bit of a stretch to expect that kind of agility from total strangers.

I didn't really intend to "unveil" the new blog until I'd made lots of decisions on where the RSS feeds would be and where the thing would be hosted. In the back of my mind I figured that I'd eventually rewire cwob.com to point to the new host, and everyone who was subscribed to the old place would magically find themselves in the new place.

At this stage, it's time to stop cutting bait. CWOB.com will remain active and will serve as the "front door" to the new site. It's easier for folks to jot down CWOB when they hear it on a podcast than "Ihnatko," so it'll still serve an important function. Keeping the domain and the old site where it is also means that I won't have to hand-migrate the old content to the new place.

But when you click on the CWOB front page, you'll be taken to the brand-new IHNATKO.COM.

Andy Ihnatko's Colossal Waste of Bandwidth has become Andy Ihnatko's Celestial Waste of Bandwidth. I like to think that I've taken the site's original goal and elevated it into a Godly mandate, as I'm sure you'll see when you visit the site.

So! It's time to empty out those desks, clear out those cubbies, find a move partner, and board the series of buses lined up in the pickup/dropoff area. Moving day has arrived.

Let's see…Bad news, Good news…still one piece of Bad News yet to come. Welp, I guess it comes down to the fact that there's three months' worth of content awaiting you at the new place.

"Oh, very nice," you say. "Nice way to reward your most longstanding and long-suffering readers! Why are we the last to know?"

I meant well.

Swear to God.

It's just that I didn't know if I'd be sticking with Wordpress, and I didn't know if I'd be sticking with that URL, and I didn't know if I'd be sticking with Feedburner as a solution for my RSS feeds…I just didn't want to have to send out a long series of posts and emails in which follow the form "You know how I told you that (n) was the new, permanent bookmark? Okay: not so much…"

And so as our little boat pulls away from the shore and the sun sets slowly in the same damned place it's been summering in every year, we bid Aloha not to CWOB — which is just moving to bigger and better digs — but to CWOBber, my AppleScript blogging app. Like the series of PowerBooks that sit in retirement on a shelf of my office, CWOBber served exceedingly well for many years. But it's earned a luxurious retirement.

But bits of CWOBber live on. Remember that many of CWOBber's tools are designed to help me write and format blog posts…and those scripts work just as well with ecto, MarsEdit and other blog editors as they did with BBEdit.

So it looks like I'm getting the best of both words. I still get to play with AppleScript, and I also get to blog from my iPhone, and incorporate podcasts, and plug my blog right into Technorati and the rest of that wunnerful blogging infrastructure…a huge list of improvements that seems to grow by the week. And the comments system means that at any hour of the day or night, I can check comments and learn that lots of people think I'm an idiot with an unhealthy attraction to Uma Thurman.

Well, so be it. Progress don't come cheap. Ask anyone who's stood between us and abundant cheap oil in the past hundred years.

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CHANGE BOOKMARKS! CWOB.COM is now IHNATKO.COM! (Final Post)

Friday, January 04, 2008 • 07:35:24 PM EST

Okay, here's irony for you: what was meant to be my final post to the old blog served as an annoying reminder of why I wanted to switch to a "real" blogging app to begin with. I failed to close a tag properly in the link to the new site, so I had to go back in and manually edit three files and FTP them up to the server all over again. In the new Wordpress blog, this wouldn't have been an issue to begin with. Even if I did want to change something, I'd just open up the blog post like any other document, make the change, and click "Save" like a normal person.

So THIS will be the final post to the old blog! Go to IHNATKO.COM and update all of your bookmarks from there.

Push the button, Frank…

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