It's Been A While

My “place” on the web has been pretty quiet lately. Not surprisingly, visits to the site have gone down by quite a bit (except the everyday searches for Blackie Lawless’s daughter). The lack of posts here, one of the longest gaps in all the years I’ve kept the blog alive, is due to the software I use.

Years ago, after using FrontPage to manually update my site, I moved to RapidWeaver for Mac. I loved the software and recommended it to anyone that would listen to me.

After many problems with my RapidWeaver on this site, our daughter’s and our family podcast, it just became too much work to update the site. Then, the comment system used in the application, Haloscan, went out of business. The comments were moved to Echo but that service leaves a lot to be desired. It mixed up comments between this site and Makenzy’s and made it difficult to find out on what post comments were made.

I would prefer to use WordPress, a platform I have become much more comfortable. Being able to update via my iPhone and from any computer is very appealing. With 1000s of themes available and tons of custimization options, WordPress is my favorite blogging service.

Sadly, though, moving to WordPress will take a considerable amount of time and effort. I wish there was a magic wand to move this site to WP but there are some obstacles:

- mattbeckwith.com is hosted on a Windows machine (my host’s, not mine) that won’t support WP - with my current hosting service, I have to move this domain to a Linux box (and boy, I’d love to) - I have more than 75,000 files / 300GB+ of data to pull down before moving - there is no utility to convert my blog posts to a format that I can import into WordPress

So, I’m not sure when, if ever, I’ll move this site over to WordPress, but I am going to start writing more.