I have a bad habit of changing things that aren’t broken… and I’ve done it again.

About two months ago I decided to switch from MoveableType to .Text. I thought this would be a move in the right direction for me. I was wrong.

I’ve been switching things back over to Linux lately. I started with the mail server, which was a resounding success. Next I migrated all of the old web sites and shell accounts to the new server. Finally, I moved this site over to it, using WordPress. I imported the old posts from MoveableType and manually imported the ones from .Text. Hopefully everything’s working okay.

By the way, I know I’ve been kind of quiet as of late. Business matters have kept me extremely busy but I’m finally back on track where I wanted to be. I still have a lot of work to do but I should actually have the time to respond to emails now.

It’s not pretty but it is effective. I’ve added a Word Stats table to the right, like I mentioned yesterday. It’s only current as of this week. I could go back and total up the other stories I’ve written so far this year, but I don’t know that its worth the effort. I’ll try to update that number daily, to reflect the previous days efforts.

Yet another interesting experiment to keep my motivation in check.

I’ve been trying out a plugin for MoveableType called Tangent for a while now. I’m really quite fond of it. I do need to adjust the settings a little to reduce the frequency of links, but that’s under my control.

I just installed the latest beta of it, so again, please let me know if you have any problems with it. I think it’s a neat way of interconnecting interesting people, and I’ll stay with it as long as I can.

I just wanted to wish everyone a happy and safe New Years. I’ll be celebrating by way of a quiet evening with my wife, watching tv and drinking sparkling grape juice.

While I was at it, I also put the photo gallery online. I’m still sorting, cataloging and keywording through thousands of pictures, but I do have a few up now.

I finally installed Sympoll, a nice little polling package. It’s the same package we’ve used on Ars Technica for quite some time now, and it works fairly well.

I’m testing out a new service by Tangent. It’s a way to link to other random sites based on interest and preference. The Moveable Type plugin is still in beta. I’ll be playing with it a bit for the next few days and see how well it works. Don’t be surprised if you see links suddenly appear throughout my entries.

Thanks to Elle, who pointed me to Tangent.

I always intended to revive the message forum after I switched the website from Postnuke to MoveableType. I decided to go with phpBB for several reasons. First, the person who wrote it is a reader of Ars Technica and its OpenForum, which I help moderate. phpBB also uses Smarty, a really cool php templating system. All in all it makes for a nice, solid system. I’ve done a little customization to try to match the theme of the forum with the main site.