So, I’ve been working on getting my web presence back up and running before I leave the country at the end of the month. I’ve found two tools that have been a big help. One is Linode–it’s a virtual private server system that’s pretty cheap ($30/mo) and gives me my own server that never goes down, never needs maintenance, and never gets unplugged and put in a trash pile, which was the principle reason artiswrong kept going down. I’m not a huge fan of paying for a server when I have a server and the ability to keep one up and running, but it’s so nice to not have to deal with the things like network outages or somebody accidentally unplugging your server that come with plugging your server in at a friend’s house or a shared area where a lot of people are running their servers. I had gone with slicehost, another virtual server service, but for a given price, it gave me more bandwidth than I needed and not enough storage, so I switched over to linode.
The other really handy thing I’ve found is a firefox plugin called scribefire. It’s a blogging client, which means it’s a program that sits on my computer that lets me write posts and publish to my blog, rather than go through the web interface. This saves a tons of time, lets me easily write posts when I’m offline, and lets me do other nice things like dragging and dropping images, dealing with tabs properly, letting my edit old posts–it’s really wonderful, and it’s made it way easier for me to blog.
So–the site is up, and I’m planning to start updating it regularly, so stay tuned!
