The blog is dead. Long live the blog!

It's been a good run but after four and a half years of nearly daily posts chronicling everything from my time at library school to the birth of my son to dozens of single link posts to all manner of technology stories and silly YouTube videos,  the time has come to finally move this blog to a newer, snappier location. 

This will likely be my last ever post at this particular URL and although my content will remain for the foreseeable future (see below), I'll likely also turn off comments in a week or two. 

I've always loved the lists so let's stick a couple last ones here…

ADVANTAGE OF MOVING MY BLOG
1. Puts me on one of the leading blogging platforms on the Internet with all the advantages that provides in terms of timely development, a wide range of plug-ins and an established community.

2. The new site will be much more mobile friendly to both view and post from.  It will also make it easier to incorporate other current technologies – those that currently exist and yet to come.  

3. It will also have much better spam protection from what I understand.  I wasn't getting a lot on this blog but enough that it was irritating to keep cleaning up comments linking to shady Australian vacation sites and so on.  I also had to turn off trackbacks as that was unmanageable.  

4. I think I finally resolved the issue with occasional outages that hit this blog about three times in four years as my site traffic grew but I still never liked being with a host that would shut down your site when you went over without any warning.  I also got in the habit of doing a “CTRL-A, CTRL-C” before trying to do any post as I never knew when my current server was going to timeout on me. 

5. Gives me a simpler, easier-to-remember domain that I now own and can take with me from host to host (as opposed to the current one which I rent and which was tied to this provider)

DISADVANTAGES OF MOVING MY BLOG
1. Since I'm currently on a non-standard platform, there's no easy way (at least that I've found) to import all my previous posts from this blog to my new one.  So that history will stay here (my current host tells me there are no plans to end support for this blogging software.  So as long as I keep my current jason@hammond.net e-mail address with them – which I plan to do – I'll still have my blog here at no additional cost) but won't be part of my new blog.

2. It's going to take awhile to get everything set-up the way I want on my new blog (I've got to remember that my current blog reflects four year's worth of tweaks and improvements) and though I've worked on WordPress a few times in the past, there will still be a bit of a learning curve now that it's my main platform.

3.  It'll probably take awhile to re-build whatever credibility Google and other sites have given my blog over my four years of posting, gaining and trading links with other sites and so on.

4.  It's a pain in the butt for you because you have to update your bookmarks, links to this site and RSS feeds (http://www.headtale.com/feed should do it.)  Thanks in advance for taking a moment to do so!

(I'll stop at four because it's pretty clear that the advantages outnumber the disadvantages.)

The paint's still drying and I've got a few things to add and tweak but I'm excited to get in there and start building up my new history.  So I encourage you to visit:

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