fplanque: dev blog

All right, almost a week into California: I got my cargo shipment from France, I unpacked it all, I bought the missing pieces at Fry's (like US power cables and a 110 Volts UPS) and transformed my dining table into a compact geek desk.

Only thing missing is a proper internet connection. However, I have my AT&T line set up and they tell me DSL will be activated tomorrow. I also hope I'll get the broadband router in the mail, otherwise it won't be of much use.

After that, no more excuses: I'll have to work again!

Until then, and since the WiFi just plain sucks (as always with shared WiFi), I guess I have no choice but to spend another day at the pool...

All right, so what's the best excuse to blog something once in a while and prove I'm not dead?

Maybe a nice blog switch...

"My Internet home is now somewhere other than wordpress! And that somewhere is called: http://wherelaurinblogs.com

I’ve bought my own domain name, loaded up b2evolution blogging software, and now have the best website in the world ever!"

Lately I have been re-testing most of b2evolution's hosting partners... As the number of hosting test sites grows though, it takes days just to update the testing software on all of them. I guess I'll have the automate that

But that's nothing compared to writing and updating the webhost reviews: I can hardly handle more than one a week and still do it seriously. And that I don't think i'll ever be able to automate

Finally it dawned on me that an increasing number of potential users don't even have a clue about web hosting, what it is or exactly why they need it. I started by writing a short intro to web hosting, but I don't think that's enough, especially for people who "just want a blog". Educating them about webhosting is a long an windy road... and I'm wondering if it wouldn't be easier to just host the blog for them...

From the Free Website Project:

"Last week I wrote a post recommending the switch to WordPress without trying the newer releases of b2evolution, ans since then I’ve had to eat my hat more than once. When you’re a blogger, it can be tempting to rely on a combination of other common knowledge, popular opinion, and intuition. The problem, as we all know, is that many times all three of these things fail."

"Before you rush to Blogger or WordPress, why not take a serious look at b2evolution. I’ve got four alliterative words for you: community, customization, and clean code."

Read the whole post!

b2evolution is available as a Gentoo Linux package.