Well that brings matters to a head

WordPress 3.0 is out, and that means something has got to be done about this here blog-a-ma-thingie. I've been thinking about what to do for a while and I've made no decisions but now is your comment window. Obviously I haven't been posting very much lately, partly due to busy-ness and partly it's because it is very surprising how much blogging can be replaced by Twitter. But here's the key bit: I'm tired of being a WordPress admin and I don't need to be hosting my own Apache web server in 2010. There are several suggestions to go from here:
  1. The blog could end with a whimper not a bang, and I simply take it offline.
  2. I could switch to a hosted site somewhere:
    1. I could switch to either something that runs WordPress or something willing to import a WordPress archive to preserve the existing almost 800 entries.
    2. I could switch to something more social/link share-y. This probably means Tumblr, although I haven't looked at it in any depth. This would likely mean there's no place for the existing entries to migrate so this is a cross between end-with-whimper and the preserve-it-all camps.
  3. I suppose somebody could make a cogent argument why I should continue to run my own deal. I don't know what that would be but hey, I'm asking for comments!
I feel a little like I still want some sort of web presence somewhere. I still want to make the occasional post that is too long for Twitter and I'd like to still have a "hub" to link together my Twitter, Flickr, and whatever else I want to put there. The big question to my mind is how much value I assign to migrating the original posts. There's a really interesting discussion here about archiving ephemera. Of course, no matter what I decide I'll make an *archive* of the blog, but is there any responsibility here to keep that stuff online? Does anybody really care what I wrote about Magic The Gathering Sets five years ago? I barely do, I have trouble imagining anyone else does. Please don't take this as any big internet drama. It's just that I don't want to be the guy responsible for keeping current on the anti-spammer technology anymore. It's interesting to me to discuss the value I should put on posts from 2003. There have already been detritus jettisoned from the blog in the past: the first year of the blog pre-Movable Type is still available, but you have to know the URL, and I never did put "Pic-A-Day" back online after some conversion or another (was that on MT? My how time flies!). So part of me says "Hey just figure out what you want from a new site and go find it. Move forward, and nobody cares about the old stuff.", but part of me feels like there is some value in the history, in the continuity. Anyway, sound off if you have opinions!
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Wordpress Update and User Policy

I just updated to the latest and greatest WordPress so give me a shoutout if you see anything weird or odd on the blog (Please, no cracks about the content itself, thank-you-very-much). This particular update was triggered by a recent uptick in new account registration, most of which look somewhat spammy in nature (and in particular one that was trying to look like an Admin account.) So I'm going to clarify my position on new users. Registration is open and it is quite likely that your first comment will be held for moderation. I get an email if a comment is held so I'll usually get to it in less than a day. But if you make an account and then don't make any comments I'll probably delete the account in a day or so. There's no reason to want an account if you aren't posting comments. My guess is that this accounts are looking for older unpatched WordPress installs and once the spambot involved finds an up-to-date version it just moves on. But if you want an account, try not to look like a spambot :-)
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Registering as a user

If you've registered as a user (in order to comment) and never received a password please try the login link again and click "Lost your password?" and hopefully it will work. If it doesn't let me know. I don't think there's anybody registered who doesn't know my email address, or you could DM me on Twitter. Turns out that it was working for me but if your mail host was restrictive on the domain name of the mail sending machine the mail would get bounced. But now you'll get an email from Gmail so it should work fine.
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While I'm Fussing About

Since I'm already fussing with the blog I went ahead and did something I've been meaning to do for a while: installed WP Super Cache. This was triggered mainly because some of the sidebar stuff seems to take forever to load, so I wanted to make sure there wasn't any weird load on my end. Every so often I see some sort of comment to the effect of "If you're running WordPress you should have Super Cache" and it finally sunk in. Everything should be fine but if you see oddness let me know.
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Flickr Weirdness

I noticed this morning that the Flickr display in the right sidebar wasn't working. No idea why really, it was working last night - I even saw it update with the new pictures mentioned in the last post. Anyway, I uninstalled that plugin and found a different one that works. (I replaced flickrRSS with Quick Flickr Widget.) I think the Flickr list should be displaying just as it was before but if you see anything amiss let me know.
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