No posts for the past three days because I finally got totally fed up with Livehost.net.  Apparently they have been subject to a number of virus attacks, and sites hosted by them have been hacked more frequently than the norm.  Combine that with the email problems (my emails from GlassHaven being rejected by Comcast, Bellsouth, and Clearwire for abuse by other users of the mail server) and enough was enough.  Time to move!!!

I set up a new hosting package through Crucial Web Host on Monday; once the account information came through yesterday I set things up and started moving files over.  Art of the Firebird first, because that was just moving files; then this blog and my mailing lists, which meant moving databases.  Once they were pretty much okay and I was pretty sure I knew what I was doing, I moved the GlassHaven.  That was the real tricky job — a database setup and software install from scratch, followed by replacing the default database with the old one from the old host, plus making sure all the other files got transferred over.  Do this without losing data, and with minimal downtime — quite a goal, but I think I hit it pretty well.  TGH was down for less than an hour, in the middle of the night, so Anastasia was pretty much the only one who noticed!

It’s taken the site location changes most of the day to propagate through the DNS system, but they finally seem to be getting themselves corrected.  I was able to set up redirects at the old location to get people to the new one, so there wasn’t any screaming paranoia from the board going down.  Really — I think this whole move was a pretty nicely handled little technical challenge if I do say so myself!

I’ve been trying to come up with a good way to save all the little snippets of stuff I find on the web — pictures, quotes, links to articles, and so on.  ReadItLater is a way to save links to web pages I don’t have time to read right now, but I don’t have it synchronized across my multiple computers.  Also, it only handles the links.  Google Notebook is another option I’m using but it’s better for more detailed stuff, or when I need to add comments to pages and such.

A blog would work as well, but I don’t want to clutter up Art of the Firebird with miscellaneous uncategorized stuff that probably is meaningful only to me. I could create a sidebar, but that still leaves me using the WordPress interface, which is overkill for this sort of thing.

What I need is an application that lets me create what Skellie calls a “swipe file,” accessible anywhere I have access to the web. So on her recommendation (and a few others) I decided to try Tumblr.  I can quickly store all my snippets there, feed a few into my sidebar here, and we’ll see how it works.  I’ll report once I’ve used it for a couple of weeks.

Check it out — Art of the Firebird’s Tumblelog.