I haven’t been posting anything because I have been spending countless hours looking at hosting services—in addition to a full-time job, a current SJSU SLIS class in PHP/MySQL, and redesigning/replanting my garden. I just signed up with site5.com (micfo.com, dreamhost.com and bluehost.com were in the running) and now need to move this Web log and everything else (a lot of invisable stuff on this Web site).

Target date for the DNS name changes to my new host is Saturday, June 18, 2005. This Web site directory will then be at librarianway.com.

I am still not totally sold on site5.com, but what they offer for the price is excellent.

They give you your own IP address, which others generally either don’t even offer, or for which they charge extra fees. I found that Site5 has the current PHP4 version that was released with a security patch, while many others are lagging behind. A hosting service that keeps on top of security patches is important. Site5 responses to my inquires, account setup, and ssh request are relatively slow compared to my current hosting service—Site5 takes hours. Also, they seem very responsive to making PHP5 available, whereas others are not as willing. PHP5 breaks a lot of software—certain blogging, forum, CMS, etc. packages—so it has to be offered only as an additional option, not the default.

My current hosting service, cedant.com, is outstanding in responsiveness, but they cost too much for me to host multiple domains. Site5 just redid their GUI interface for accounts, so they are probably spending a lot of time fixing problems on that and the hours I have to wait for response may not be typical. Furthermore, they appear to be shorthanded due to fast growth because of their revamped GUI and high praise on their hosting plan features—they are actively hiring. Site5, as with Micfo and many others that I looked at, encourage shared-hosting accounts to use their forums to get help, instead of private email. In my case, I am asking for something that cannot be resolved in a forum. Cedant had you contact them directly and in all the years I have been with them, they have never taken more than 30 minutes—usually less—to give me an answer. Once, when I need access to software that was not on the host I was on, they moved my Web site to a new host while I slept (around midnight). I will miss Cedant; They have such knowledgeable and efficient staff.

This is the first time I have moved domains. I will be doing two major things with this portion of the Web site— programmingpeers.com/librarianway — that may break things for others. I will move librarianway to its own domain name, librarianway.com, and I will also be changing the blogging software. I was going to go with Wordpress, but now I am trying to decide if I should use Drupal, a CMS system, instead. It has a highly recommended blogging module, though not as many features as Wordpress. However, I really want to learn to work with Drupal, as I believe it is an option for Web sites for some libraries.

Whatever I decide, I have to find out how to preserve the archive paths from Movable Type so that people who have linked to them don’t get broken links. I also do not know what will break in news aggregators, like Bloglines. This is a new learning experience for me.

We had a little excitement this morning. There was a magnitude 5.6 earthquake about 50 or so miles from here. My cat was quite frightened and I ran to stand in a doorway. It lasted only a couple of seconds in my area and the aftershocks didn’t get this far. I learned in the government documents class about a Web site to get information about earthquakes, and went there as soon as I sat down again: Maps of Recent Earthquake Activity in California-Nevada.