I am proud to announce the opening of the new version of the Fred On Something blog.
Why have I changed the blog? The first reason is to be able to blog when I will be in India, in some months. I needed to have access to a web interface to publish my posts and Radio Userland did not give me that possibility. So I started to search for a blogging platform and hosting service. It is at that time that the “28 things to check when searching for a blog system and a hosting service” list is born.
I finally got all these wanted features at a local traditional web hosting company that created a new blog hosting service last week. I got this beautiful package for 9$ CND per month at IWeb-Hosting. The blogging system used by Iweb-Hosting is b2Evolution. It is a beautiful piece of software wrote by Francois Planque. It is really easy to install and to customize.
The transfer had been a pain. I had to repost all my posts and comments, and also had to change the dates of each of them. Why? Because there is no any exportation feature in Radio Userland, so I had to do it by hand. It took me around 12 hours to populate my blogs with posts and comments. So take care of this more than essential feature when you search for a blog system!
I had modified and added many things to the basic installation of b2Evolution. So if you find something interesting and would like to add it to your b2Evoltion’s installation, feel free to contact me and I will send you all the code and information you need to implement the feature.
What is new in this version of Fred On Something’s blog?
- A comments blog
- A links blog
- A quotes blog
- The access to some articles I wrote
- The possibility to put your avatar (via Gravatar) when you comment
- The possibility to syndicate all individual blogs
- The possibility to syndicate the aggregator blog (this blog aggregate all the other blogs. So if you want to be warn when something appear on one of these blogs, syndicate it)
- The possibility to syndicate the comments feeds
- A good search engine
- A domain name
- And other cool little things that you will discover while surfing it
I hope you will enjoy this new blog.
Please leave me your impressions and suggestions to improve it.
Sudar
June 23, 2005 — 2:38 am
Hi Fred
Nice to see your new blog. I just cannot imagine the pain of shifting all the posts with their comments and thanks for doing it so that we readers don’t miss out any of your post.
Best wishes with your new blog
And it’s nice to see that you have added rss for the comments 😉
Max
June 23, 2005 — 7:54 am
You made a great work, Fred!
The aggregated blog/feed is simply amazing.
BTW, the new blogs are noticeably faster than the previous one, thank you.
Bye
David
June 23, 2005 — 10:15 am
Welcome to the “real” blogging world. Love the modified Kubrick template (originally made for WordPress :P)
Glad to see you moved over to something more professional and thus suitable.
Fred
June 23, 2005 — 10:47 am
Hello All,
Thank for your kind words 🙂
Yeah, I forgot to add it to the list: much more fast. Radio was a pain 😉
So, if you have some features that you would like to see, leave me a word, I will implement it when I will have some free hours (the next feature I will implement is the “leave me an email if new comments are wrote” feature proposed by sudar 🙂
Take care,
Salutations,
Fred
Fortrel
June 24, 2005 — 8:39 am
I love the new site. It’s fun to see the comments right away and not having to bring that ugly pop-up you had on Radio. I can’t beleive you went through the trouble of re-submitting all your old post. I’m probably just lazy, but I would have simply created a link to the old site…
I might have to do the same thing and start using a real blog engine one of those days… Right now I installed a Wiki and uses its blogging pluggin, but it’s not as neat as all the blogs I’ve seen so far. At least it stores all the posts and comments in text files, so I can come up with a quick PERL script to repopulate a new blog if I eventually decide to go to another blog engine.
BTW, I think 9$ CDN a month is quite expensive… I pay 30$ CDN a year for my web hosting, and they offer all kind of applications, like b2Evolution and WordPress.
Fred
June 24, 2005 — 10:29 am
Hello Fortrel!
It is exactly for this that I reposted every posts and comments by hand: because in the future, I will be able to do it with a little script. I wanted to centralize all my writings and comments of my readers at the same place.
Where do you host your wiki?
Everything is relative… I mean, I have an account where I can put 2gig of photos (and 1000gig of transfer per month), 5 pop accounts with a web-interface, and all my weblog and forum space/bandwidth is unlimited. And I have a 24/hour technical support.
All in all it is the best place I found, however I wait for your answer to see if I found a better place 🙂
Take care,
Salutations,
Fred
Fortrel
June 27, 2005 — 7:56 am
Oh, 2 Gb of data… That’s huge! My account only has 15 Mb of storage, but I have a Flickr Pro account, so I put my pictures there. I host my web site at “La Centrale Internet” in Montreal. They offer 24/7 support, although it’s not the best I’ve seen and they had trouble in the past. The storage size would explain the price difference between my bundle and yours.
Fred
June 27, 2005 — 11:32 am
Hello Fortrel,
Yup, it probably explains de difference 🙂
However, if you check it, 9$ per month is 1 moccachino per week, for three weeks, or 1 coffee per week in a hotspot 🙂
Salutations,
Fred