The Move is Done!

I blame Mokuren Dojo for speeding up the inevitable. I had planned on doing this in two weeks. However, a very bad television night led me to play around. An hour later and I was 90% done!

So, welcome to the new Striking Thoughts!

Now with even more feet!

The reason for my move was simple: I could not justify the 7.95 a month for DreamHost. Hey, I may have to start paying for commercial martial arts lessons this summer so what can I say? Regardless, if you are looking for a hosting service DreamHost rocks. You get a ton of storage space and they have lots of one-click installs including your own hosted WordPress blog.

This having been noted, I tested out the WordPress FREE blogging service for a few months now. For what I do blog-wise it is more than enough. Aside from the features that they list in that link here’s a few more:

• The platform automatically pings Technorati and few other services
• They promote your blog within the WordPress community of blogs
• You can choose to have your blog appear in search engines like Google
• Several dozen free templates, all with customizable headers
• As always, the ability to categorize your posts
• A good selection of widgets (everything in my right side bar is a widget)
• Very easy to use
• Took minutes to import all my old posts from my hosted WordPress blog
• You can import from Blogger and most other major blog platforms
• THEY handle all the version upgrades
• Spam protection via Akismet

The downside? You only get 50 mb of free image space (probably more than enough for me). You can buy up to 10 GB of space for a cost of $90 per year (they have cheaper image space options too). In addition, if you want to customize your CSS it costs $15 for a year. Finally, you lose the ability to add the hundreds of WordPress plugins and are stuck with their selection widgets.

So unless you are an über geek there is really no point to paying that much money for stuff or space you never use.

Honestly, my one complaint which I’ve already voiced to them is this: They need to add a collapsible calendar archive widget. I’ve blogged for three years now and have a fairly lengthy archive so it’d be nice to collapse it like I did at my old home. However, I could remove their archive widget and just go with a tag cloud widget.

The other nice thing which I REALLY like is that many of their free templates come with the ability to create extra tabbed web pages. This is what I did at the top of this blog. So, even if you loose the ability to customize in your sidebar you do gain this for free.

I doubt I’ll go through and clean up my old imported posts. So, there may be dead image links or funny coding. In addition, please update your bookmarks and also take the time to click on my Propaganda tab and favorite me at Technorati. During the next few weeks I’ll have to promote this new place to some of the usual spots.

Past that, look for the usual ramblings at this URL!

Addendum: It pays to approve your comments. A reader pointed out that I can collapse my archive!

~BCP