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Blog-Parents

RaptorMagic

Orcinus

Blog-Brothers

Callimachus
(Done with Mirrors)

Gelmo
(Statistical blah blah blah)

Other Blogs I Read
Regularly Often

Athletics Nation

Andrew Sullivan
(Daily Dish)

Kevin Drum
(Political Animal)

Hilzoy
(Obsidian Wings)

 Sunday, September 13, 2009
Blog Update

Hmm. Looking through the archive, I see the last time I was posting with any regularity was early March.

Not that I need an excuse for not posting, but that's the time of year when my day job gets especially busy and stays that way till April 15. Immediately after that I had a rather significant crisis in my personal life (which I don't care to discuss here, though nearly all my regular readers know what I'm talking about). That in turn necessitating moving, with all the distraction and disruption entailed in the process of packing up and settling in again elsewhere.

That takes me up to early June. For the rest of the summer, I don't know, I guess I just fell out of the habit. This post is by way of falling back into the habit.

After past resurrections of Benzene, I've set a goal of posting daily for a while. I don't expect that this time, but I do want to get back to two or three posts a week. I have several months worth of half-written posts either in notes or in my head, and most of them are no less interesting now than they were when they were fresh. I also still haven't given up on my "books I've read" series, even though I'm more than a year behind and may have lost track of a few.

The Future of Benzene

A few weeks ago, I got an email from the makers of Radio (the brand of blog software I use) informing me that they will discontinue their service at the end of this calendar year. I ended up on Radio more or less by accident; it's what Pete was using at the time, so I followed his example. Not long after that Pete moved on to one of the free services, but I was happy enough with Radio so I stayed put. Radio is run as a subscription service, and for $40 a month you get whatever updates they make to the software plus server space for your blog. I'm not sure I ever updated the software, since it was working just fine for me without upgrading, but I figured the $40/year was a small price to pay for not having to think about how to make my blog work.

Now I do have to think. Some time between now and the end of the year, I need to decide whether to migrate to some other service, continue in Radio but upload it somewhere else, or just hang up the blog altogether and call it quits. All three seem plausible to me.

Radio software has an option for uploading to an address other than Radio's default space. I've never tried it but I assume it's not hard. My problem is figuring out where I'd go. I keep a mirror of Benzene on my hard drive at home, and the entire archive is 8.7 MB, more than half of which is 2004, my first year. That doesn't strike me as very large — its smaller than one medium-sized video file — but I still don't have anywhere to put it. My Earthlink service gives me five email addresses with 5 MB of space for each. Since I'm only using about two and a half of those for other stuff, I'd have enough space if only I could combine two of the 5 MB allotments into one, but I don't think I can do that.

If anyone out there has any advice for cheap low-traffic webspace, I'd be interested in hearing it. I'm also interested in recommendations for other blog software to switch to.

11:39:22 PM  [permalink]  comment []