You will have seen from my previous post that I’ve moved this blog recently. There were a few challenges associated with this which I want to document here, but perhaps the first thing to tackle is why I was moving the blog in the first place.

The domain www.meanboyfriend.com came about through a joke between me and my girlfriend (now wife) , Damyanti, about what a mean boyfriend I was, and how she would publish a list of my misdemeanours on a website dedicated to this – meanboyfriend.com (at least, I think it was a joke). When we decided to setup a blog, buying the meanboyfriend.com domain seemed like a good punchline. I can’t remember now whether choosing our own domain name was the result of clear thinking about wanting to own the domain on which our stuff lived or not – but I think in retrospect it was a good decision (rather than simply using the URL provided by Typepad).

At the time (6 years ago) the Typepad blogging platform was getting good reviews, and Moveable Type (which powered Typepad) was one of, if not the, leading blogging platforms. We setup a joint account with Typepad – because of the type of account we have with Typepad, we have a single user – which is our joint account, and all entries on our blogs appeared to be by our amalgamated personality – damyantiandowen. Also the FOAF file that Typepad will automatically create for you was for this joint identity. We are also limited to three blogs on the account.

Having sorted out the technical side, we setup our first blog – Overdue. This was a personal blog, which was aimed primarily at friends and family. We also used the Typepad photo facility to put up photos from holidays etc. To be honest, we’ve never been that great at updating the blog, although we use the photos a lot (and as a result have never really invested in Flickr or Picasa or other similar photo sharing services). After a hiatus of over a year covering the whole of 2008, we decided that we would try to refocus the blog on food/drink stuff  – see our explanation at Foods for thought. As this is truly a ‘joint’ blog, entries appearing as authored by damyantiandowen are fine – and although each entry is generally written by one or the other of us, it feels like a joint venture.

Shortly after this, I decided that a professional blog would be useful to record thoughts and ideas relating to my work. I set this up as Overdue Ideas (see what I’m doing here?). This was mapped to a URL we owned, still under the meanboyfriend.com domain (http://www.meanboyfriend.com/overdue_ideas). Although in theory I would have been happy for this to be a joint blog (and I should acknowledge that many of my ideas and posts come out of conversations with Damyanti), in practice I was the only author. This made the joint account a bit of an issue – not on a day to day basis, but just occasionally. Last week I was contacted by someone wanting to quote Overdue Ideas, and unsure whether the quote should be attributed to me or Damyanti. This confusion has happened more than once.

Some years passed with this being the basic situation – 1 account, 2 blogs, some photos and a few bits a pieces were hosted on Typepad and appeared under http://www.meanboyfriend.com. As our account would support 3 blogs, we are currently using the 3rd blog as a protected file space (as far as I can tell on Typepad you can only protect at the blog level, not on individual files or pages) for stuff we only want to share with specific people.

So why move?

Over time, I feel that the Typepad application hasn’t quite kept up with state of the art in blogging, and as I saw what others were acheiving with WordPress I got some tech envy. WordPress supports a huge array of plugins, and Akismet seems to be state of the art as far as catching comment spam goes – although this wasn’t a massive problem on my blog, it was an irritant with one or two spam messages a week to clear out (I should say that this was the stuff that got through – Typepad’s own spam filters caught a lot of spam for me that didn’t make it to the blog)

Also, the issue of our con-fused (see Neal Stephenson) identities was an occasional issue – especially as discussions about online identity moved on I realised that we had a bit of a problem here. As well as the confusion for readers – who was actually writing this blog, and who had authored which post – there were other issues. Typepad automatically creates FOAF files – but for us, this was for our joint identity. Typepad also supports OpenID, but again we got one OpenID between the two of us.

The final push came when Damyanti wanted to setup her own blog – which would have taken us beyond our 3 blog limit.

One solution to much of this would have been to upgrade our Typepad account (from ‘Plus’ to ‘Pro’). This would have allowed us to have unlimited blogs, and unlimited authors. But in the end my techno-lust won the day – I wanted a bit more flexibility, and the ability to do other things (e.g. install other software).

It looked like it was time to move blogging platforms to support our separate identities, multiple blogs and satisfy my techno-lust. Having seen a number of people I know on Twitter mentioning Dreamhost, and getting some good feedback when I asked on how it was working, I decided to go with them as a host. As I’ve already mentioned, I’d been admiring what people could do with WordPress – I was blown away by the iPhone theme that Joss Winn has on his blog (when viewed with an iPhone)

So – you are now reading this blog powered by WordPress, and hosted by Dreamhost. The move was slightly traumatic, but if I can, I’ll document this separately. If you are thinking of doing a similar move (and are of the tech inclination) I’d recommend Rob Styles post on moving from Typepad to WordPress for information on dealing with redirecting URLs etc – something I struggled with (and still haven’t completely dealt with).