Right now Meps and I are in the middle of the process of moving our virtual home. While we were living with Brian, we had put quite a few bits of ourselves up on Brian’s webpage. But we are no longer living there, and upon moving out, decided it was time for our own website too.

After several days of searching for available urls, we ended up here, and we think this will be a good place. Moving is, of course, always a combination of disruption, excitement, hard work, and opportunities, and some things may be in different categories depending upon who and when you ask. Here’s some of the stuff that’s been keeping me busy these days:

• The last site was mostly done in Movable Type, but by the time we started this one, there was a new version (3.0) with a new license that was generating near universal bile and hatred from the blogging community. The licensing scheme has improved a bit, but it still seems that a simple site like this one which has two authors (barry and meps), no longer qualifies for the free copy, while previously anything non-commerical qualified for the free version. I couldn’t even find the older version (with a license we could use legitimately) on their website. While on one hand I hate to stop using good software just because I’m a cheapskate, on the other hand, I am not sure how much I want to trust my stuff to folks who keep changing the rules and costs of playing with them. Amid all the outcry about the new license, I found suggestions of alternative blogging software.
• I went looking and found WordPress as a possible alternative, and started looking at installing it. Right now, it seems a little simpler and cleaner, although I do miss the wonderfully written documentation of Movable Type.
• This gave me the opportunity to learn about PHP and MySQL, and I always love learning about new computer tools, so this was fun. Since the Vero Beach Public Library doesn’t have a good selection, I read my first “dummies” book, and found that it had some good stuff even though I hate to consider myself to be in the target audience!
• We never did get that photoblog or photoalbum that we had been planning to do someday, so I’m back looking at stuff I can use to make that job easier.
• Meps and I get to play around with designing a new site design, including using some of these new toys.

Anyhow, it is now time to stop web-surfing and playing with new computer goodies and put something up, so that’s what I’m doing now. I’m sure it will take a bit longer to finish the move-in process, but in the meantime, we’re going to get a couple things up on the site. Like a physical move, there will be a few things that stay in the cardboard boxes waiting until we get around to finding the right home for them, so be patient, we’ll get around to it eventually. There were also a couple bits we wrote earlier but couldn’t put up here since we didn’t have a blog to put them on, so they are going in, back-dated, along with our old “Travels with Meps ‘n’ Barry” stuff.