I’ve been spending a lot of time doing things other than updating things here. Most of my time lately has been working on hosting changes for various domains, including this one. For years, this site has been hosted by Brian and Greg, who operated a small hosting company. Their client included several of the original “Daynoters” group, who I became involved with at least 10 years ago. This was a group that created their own web sites where they write mostly daily notes on their activities. They were at the vanguard of the millions of bloggers that write today. This was all pre-Blogger and pre-Wordpress, which make it much easier for non-technical types to create a blog.

I decided to get in on that, mostly as a way to get the “DigitalChoke” short story on the Interwebs. So I started by creating all of the web pages to make “DigitalChoke” story readable on the Interwebs, plus a mostly daily blog of what I was doing. I eventually got inducted into the “Daynotes Gang”, and used Brian and Greg’s hosting services.

After many years of being excellent site hosts, Brian and Greg decided to move on to other areas of interest, so their clients needed to find a new host. I’ve been using JustHost and Bluehost for several years. The JustHost folks have been the hosts of this site (and all of the others that I have created over the years. But I also worked with Bluehost for several of the other sites I maintain.

Among Brian/Greg’s clients was Dr. Jerry Pournelle, science fiction writer, and long-time columnist for the late Byte magazine (print version; they are starting up an ‘e-magazine’ soon). I’ve been reading his Byte columns since the 1970’s, and have followed his web site (www.jerrypournelle.com ) almost since it’s inception. And I have been on his small board of advisors for many years.

So when the notice came that he needed to move his domains to a new host, there was a discussion by his advisor’s group on what to do. And I volunteered to do the work of setting up and moving his domains to a new host (we chose Bluehost). He wrote his site using FrontPage 2003, which is no longer a supported product by Microsoft. And although he has probably one of the original ‘blogs’, this process was getting a bit cumbersome – there was a bit of back-end work that had to be done to keep his content visible.

His advisors group had been discussing moving his blog to a new platform, so I created a test WordPress area that would show how WordPress would work as a new blogging platform. And then the need for the hosting move came up, and we decided (with Dr. Pournelle being somewhat reluctant) to move to the WordPress platform with the hosting move. So I have been spending a lot of time fine-tuning the new site, modifying the theme (Atahualpa; excellent WordPress theme with full customization ability), plus the actual moving of the almost 1GB of content on his sites. And some custom programming of the backend programs that are used by WordPress to display the content. And setting up his mail accounts, spam filtering, subscriber databases, etc.  Along with some new training in the processes of creating the content for the WordPress-based blog, setting up accounts, making DNS changes, and all of that. All stuff that I have done before for the 30-odd domains/sites that I own or maintain.

And during that time, working on several e-books for Dr. Pournelle’s republishing of his science fiction books.

So a lot of night and weekend work to get things moved and ready for the hosting move. Plus a lot of work tweaking things. But the hosting move for Dr. Pournelle’s sites is done; you can see the new WordPress-based blog at www.jerrypournelle.com/chaosmanor .I think it looks pretty good. We’re still tweaking his writing/publishing process. He’s using (mostly) Microsoft’s LiveWriter to create and publish his WordPress entries. It’s a pretty nice but basic program that lets you create and publish with a Word-like interface, plus the benefit of seeing the content as it will look ‘live’. (In fact, I’m using LiveWriter to create this entry.)

All of that, plus the usual house and family stuff. Pam’s got a new giant scraproom in the basement, I have a small garden (strawberries, peas, and tomatos) after the late spring around here, plus the weekly meetings with the 11-year-old Scouts. And the visits from the grandchildren and children for Sunday dinner (tri-tip today). And there is the full-time day job to take care of.

Been a bit busy.

  for Dr. Jerry Pournelle. His main site (www.jerrypournelle.com ) required moving to