“Why do you have a chicken on your blog now?” asked my sister, Shannon. “Because I moved where I’m hosting it.” “What’s that got to do with it?” “Uh… nothing.”
So I’ve moved my blog (and indeed, all of the startlingly large USSJoin.com empire, now comprising 9 domains with many more subdomains, email, jabber, etc.) to Linode, whom I’ve been using as the Mnikr host for several months with great success. For years now, I’ve been a happy DreamHost customer, but I’ve outgrown what they can provide– they can’t host Mnikr as I need special abilities to run Rails applications (and I need a server on which I have root to get those abilities), and their shared offerings are just too slow these days (not noticeable to users of my staticly-generated blog, but really obnoxious to me as I use the backend and other hosted services).
As a side effect of the move, I had the opportunity to recreate my Movable Type installation from scratch, letting me ditch lots of code I’d messed up while learning MT. The most visible consequence of this is that yes, both http://blog.ussjoin.com and http://ussjoin.com now have pictures of chickens on them. (There are other, more positive, template changes as well, but they’re somewhat more subtle.) I’ll find a more-interesting replacement soon, and then the chickens will just be a bad memory, I promise. :-)
And very soon now, I’ll write a more substantive blog post or three; I have topics, but I’ve been sprinting from school project to school project recently, with no time for blogging. Soon, though.