First Blogger Post

My server has been down every since I left Cornell. Technically speaking, my new ISP ( Internet Service Provider ) in Madison does not allow me to share my website content with the rest of the world. I have indeed investigated some other solutions, but non of them was satisfactory.

There is a lot of free blogging stuff on line, and I had been reluctant to use them because of many limitations. And mostly as a CS nerd, I just hope that I can do everything by myself. It feels good to host everything by yourself, cuz you are kinda playing God.

However, I have given up on those kind of thoughts. Life is changing, and I realized that I do not want to deal with much of these kind of stuff much more. What I mean is needing the time to care about my server; every time I upgrade my computer, much more work has to be done just so that the server can work correctly. It was fun before, now it has become a burden.

To be technical again. When hosting something like a blog, the best solution is to use some implemented package, and run a web server + a database on my own computer. The package will utilize the web server and the database to create all the functionalities in the blog (commenting, trackback, categorization and so on). I have hosted a database before, and don't want to do that anymore. Again, once computer is upgraded, the migration is just annoying. So I chose iBlog when I started "HoneyGreenTea" when I was in Cornell. This specific package requires no database, and is very configurable that I can add stuff I like myself. If you still remember, most stuff on the right hand panel were implemented by myself. Very unfortunately, iBlog is a very very unstable piece of software. I have almost lost all my entries many times. This is very very uncool.

So after poking around a little more, in the little free time I have since I started working ( didn't dare to spend time on these before I got a job ), I decided to give up my hope on hosting things by myself, and choose some premade system such as Blogger to continue my blog. All I need to do is write, and need no extra time to maintain things. I guess this is really the way to go. Why not losing a little bit of freedome to gain much more time both from maintaing the server and implementing the system. This way, I also don't have to wait no more to post before I have the system up running. Also I will not have the constrain that the ISP being an asshole. ( * NOTE: if you can avoid Charter Inc. DO SO! )

All these said, I will start/continiue my blog now on blooger. Although my server was down, I actually have tried very hard to keep myself writing. So I actually have all the entries stored on my computer from May to now. I will slowly repost everything on blogger.

I do not really know at this moment what will happen to www.laushu.idv.tw . If the ISP is good in Seattle ( Redmond to be exact) it might be up running once again. I have wanted to redo the whole thing for a real long time. But at least for now, blogging will officially be tested on bloggers. I hope this will be a place where I can stay for long now. I don't feel like moving around anymore. Since my first diary entry, the winter I graduated, I have moved three times. Hopefully this one will be the end of the experiments, and say permenant.

LauShu, Dec. 17 2005