Open Monologue
Just because I'm making it up as I go along doesn't mean I don't know what I'm doing

I’ve been hosting this and many other sites from a reseller web hosting account I have with Varial Technologies, which is (unpaid endorsement) a great web hosting company based in Saskatoon. At some point I think I had a grandiose vision of running a web hosting service to bring in at least enough money to at least cover the cost of my own hosting. I never really followed through on that very much, offering hosting for a few friends and quite often I would barter free hosting for the year for something they had or could do for me. Consequently, the dreamed of  financial offsetting of my web sites never really worked.

Another reason for downsizing my hosting duties is time. There was a time in my life during which I loved the chance to geek out for several hours at a time. My job duties gave me the chance to do this during the day, and I would often have time in the evenings when I could noodle around. Alas, situations have changed. My teaching duties have moved in slightly different directions (which are fantastic – I’m more excited about my teaching duties than I have been in some time). I’ve also been shifting a lot of my evening time towards my family. Part of the shift is out of necessity – two kids are not twice the work of one, they are the work squared – but part is from a realization that The Kids™ won’t always want time with me as much as they do now. I want to make sure I make the most of the time when they want my time and attention as much as they do now.

The maturity of some of the content management systems, like WordPress and Drupal, has also reduced the amount of geeking out I need to manage a system. I don’t have time to do the tweaking and micro-adjusting as much as I once did, and I really don’t have to. I remember tweaking – or maybe bludgeoning is a better term – Movable Type to turn it into a decent CMS for managing my classes. The maturity of WordPress as a platform, and all the widgets and plugins that are available, have reduced the dedication to hacking PHP that was once needed. Quite honestly, I can run a site on wordpress.com that will be just as functionally and aesthetically pleasing as one that I host myself given the amount of time I want to put in to tweaking. Since the sites that I’m hosting are either WordPress blogs or testing sites for playing with different content management/blog/wiki software, I’ve decided to do just that and move most of my sites over to wordpress.com. This site has been over there for a while and the experience has been good. I’ll also be moving the EdTech Posse web site, the World of Wall (a site I use for school stuff) and Openthinking.ca (which I’ve never really done anything with but the domain name is too cool to give up; maybe I’ll just give it to Alec). There are a couple of sites I’ll still look after myself, but for the most part I’m moving my web empire so that someone else can look after the day to day management.

Enough writing – it’s time to go home and build some Megablock machines with The Boy™.