Moving to Blogger

After 4 years of maintaining Movable Type on my web server, I've decided to switch to Blogger. Moveable Type was just becoming a maintenance nightmare, and it was easier to move than to get it back into working condition. I'm still maintaining my son's blog in Movable Type, but I'm shutting down my photography blog. Since I started using flickr, I really hadn't been maintaining it anyway. I may start posting pictures here instead. My thoughts so far:

• The author's interface in Blogger is a decade ahead of MovableType. That alone made it worth the switch. The blogger interface is similar to that of most Google services. Very smooth and clean.
• None of Bloggers templates were wide enough to display landscape flickr images. Altering an existing one to fit took about an hour of tinkering (resizing images, took most of the time). Now I won't be able to switch themes again without sitting back down in front of Photoshop. Kind of a pain.
• There were a lot more publishing options with Blogger than I expected. I haven't used a free hosting service since before Geocities was bought up by Yahoo. I hadn't expected it to cater to secure-ftp or hosted domains.
• The help on Blogger is pretty good, but I would have loved a feature matrix showing the pros and cons of each hosting method. I had find out which to use by trial and error.

I'm looking forward to getting rid of this template and putting something together that's a little more personalized, but for now, at least I'm not spending time removing spam from my comments.

Layout Change

After a few months of using MovableType, I've finally taken the time to integrate the interface into my web site. One of these days I need to switch to a JSP enabled web server so I can generate the navigation bar at the top of this page!!!

I want the focus of my blog to be a bit different than most I see on most others. Rather than posting the mundane events of my every day life, I would rather focus on quality. I may only post a few messages a month. Hopefully I should have less "I heard something funny on the radio this morning" and more about issues in the Java community that I feel are important.