I will still provide some services I’ve provided before, but I’m mostly intending to turn this site into more of a ‘how to’ site about blogging. Not so much how to write, but some of the little things that newbies don’t know when they decide to start a blog.

Things like, “FTP? What is FTP?” or “What do they mean you have to change permissions on the directory?” — little things like that. The basic stuff. The things all the old-timers on the internet (like me) think that everyone knows. I will be asking others for advice on what to talk about, since I knew how to use FTP (and telnet, not to mention gopher and archie and veronica) before the Mosaic browser came out (just google it). Yeah, I’m an old-timer. So what? I still remember being a newbie, and I remember how confusing it all was. That’s what counts.

I’m going to be putting up some very basic tutorials, recommendations for useful sites and programs and yes — the economy being what it is — some of those will be affilate links but not all of them. I refuse to recommend something just because it has an affiliate program, and I equally refuse to not recommend something because it doesn’t.

I’ll also be posting things about internet safety, spam, scams and other things of that nature. I’ve always hated spammers, and my present job involves email newsletters. Because of the Can Spam act, legitimate newsletters MUST come from a working email address. We have responses from all our clients’ sending addresses forwarded to us, as well as them (so we can check for ‘unscubscribe me’ responses from people who couldn’t find the very obvious unsubscribe button). Ever gotten 30,000 spam emails in a week? I have. I despise spammers, and most of them are scammers as well. (The rest are just fools.)

Just looking at some of the people hosting here and pricing if they want to upgrade. Quick check of Harry’s Place counts 4 authors (maybe more), that would be $120 for them. Dodgeblogium has 3 who post regularly and several more who post occassionally, $120 minimum and probably $150. Horizon has only two, so they could get by with just $70, as could On The Third Hand.

And here’s a cute one, from their free license (the only one I can read):

Making Copies
You may install the Software on only one (1) computer or server having a single CPU. You may make one (1) copy of the Software in any machine readable form solely for back-up purposes, provided you reproduce the Software in its original form and with all proprietary notices on the back-up copy.

The bloghouse server, just for your information, runs on 4 CPUs. Every other decent host on the Internet also uses multiple CPUs. Cute, eh? I’m hoping they aren’t really being that sneaky, that they copied some license stuff from other software and didn’t think to fix that (yet). However, at this point I’m not sure.

There are plenty of alternatives out there, both pay and totally free. I will be looking into which ones have scripts and/or guides for migrating MT to their program. I know already that there is help available for WordPress (which is completely free). PMachine has a script for conversion also, I’ll see what I can find out. If anyone knows of other alternatives to MT that offer reasonably easy conversion, please leave a comment!

Nucleus looks good but has no conversion scripts. Sigh.

I will be offering services to anyone who wants to convert to other software. Not free, but definitely cheaper than MT’s new “special offer” $69.95 license.

[update] I’ve found instructions for migrating from MT to Drupal. I’ll probably try that as a test for my own MT blog. I absolutely love Drupal (it’s what I run the design area on). I’ve also found instructions and script for migrating from MT to Textpattern. [update 2] Having looked further at the Drupal instructions, I think I’ll stick with WordPress or just start OTTH anew…

Thanks to Deb, in the comments at On The Third Hand, for this link to an update on Mena’s blog. Turns out that CPU thing, as I thought it might be, was an error and has been removed. They’ve made some other changes/improvements, as well.

The paths to Perl and Sendmail are common defaults. You should rarely have to change either.
Note: If you set up your own subdomain, your path would be like the subdomain accounts above, except you would substitute your username for ‘blog’.