Phil’s blog

I was able to book a ryokan at the last minute for our first night in Japan. I had originally planned to look for a love hotel when we got there (for the cheaper rate), but figured we’d be tired and not want to have to look around too much after traveling. The first 2 places I called were booked, but the third, Ryokan Katsutaro, had just the room we wanted (Japanese style with bath). The people I spoke with at each ryokan only spoke a bit of English, but were very patient. This will be an interesting trip!

Not a day has passed and I’ve already changed my blogging host. I decided that the permalinked posts I’d get using WordPress.com were more important than the permanent URL I’d have using my own host. If I do switch hosts, I can simply leave a message saying so as my last entry in this blog. All previous entries will still exist, so any links to them will still be good. I doubt many people, if any, will ever link to my blog, but if they do, I owe it to them to keep my content up for as long as WordPress.com is around. Regarding portability of data, I learned that WordPress.com supports blogging APIs including the MetaWeblog API, which has a method that can return all the posts from a blog. So if I ever need to transplant my content onto another blogging platform, I should be able to get it done with a quick script.

After hours of research and internal deliberation, I decided to go with WordPress hosted on my DreamHost account. Here are the criteria I used:

• Critical: portability of data. In other words, if I ever want to switch blogging platforms, I need to be able to transfer my old posts with relative ease.
• Critical: tagging
• Critical: anyone can comment
• Critical: protection from comment spam
• Desirable: permalinks. This means each post has a permanent web address, and yes, this could conflict with the first criterion.
• Desirable: permanent blog URL

Here are the platforms I considered:

• LiveJournal, Xanga, and other closed communities: Most of the bloggers I know use them. Why? The most obvious reason is the snowball effect of using what your friends use (which I suppose is why Xanga users are primarily asian and LiveJournal users primarily white). These communities are suitable for non-geeks because they make it easy to subscribe to friends’ blogs (basically serving as an aggregator), provided that they use the same platform. If these services would allow users to subscribe to any RSS or Atom feed, it would make life easier for many, many people who have had to make accounts on multiple services, or choose one and miss out on integration with friends’ blogs on another.
• Blogger: As much as I’d like to use another service from the company I’m about to work for, Blogger needs help. First, no tags. Second, the Atom API only allows retrieval of the last 15 entries. If I’m going to put the effort into writing a post, I’d damn well better be able to retrieve it without some arcane screen-scraping or filesystem-reading scheme. I know that Google is revamping this service, so perhaps I’ll switch over once it’s more “Googley” (it was an acquisition, not an original product).
• WordPress: Geeks swear by it. Tags? Check. Open commenting option? Check. Spam protection? Yes, via Akismet. The other criteria depend on hosting: WordPress.com or my own web host. WordPress.com would give me permalinks to posts since I could leave the old content up after changing platforms, but of course wouldn’t allow a permanent URL for the blog itself. Using my own host gives me my permanent URL of choice (phil.harton.org/blog), though permalinks could suffer if I changed software, plus it would be a hassle to transport if I switched web hosts. Using my own host wins hands down for portability of data because I have complete access to the database itself, plus a php API that allows me to slice and dice my content as I please. Ultimately I went with this option, though if I find out I can programmatically access all my posts under WordPress.com, I may switch over.