Where have all the blog posts gone?

On Friday, exactly seven days after my blog went dark, I finally had an email from technical support, from the same person who emailed originally to say the directory where my blog lives was being locked. Short and sweet, the email said that the directory could be unlocked if I could tell them what applications and scripts I was running. That I did. A profound silence ensued, and the blog remains dark.

I suppose this Friday, I will receive yet another teasing email about the situation.

To occupy myself this weekend, I spent Saturday and Sunday working on a new site, in case the old one is never made accessible. Even if the directory is opened again, I intend to replace my blog with my redesigned site, after importing my old blog posts of course.

The new blog is going to use WordPress software, rather than b2 Evolution, for a couple reasons. WordPress can import from both Blogger and b2. I've already done an import from Blogger, and it worked perfectly. This was something I was never able to do with b2. It will be great to have all my blog posts going back to Spring 2003 on one site.

WordPress also offers better spam fighting plugins. This is very important to me. I don't know if the amount of spam I was receiving had anything to do with site5 shutting down my other blog, but I know I was growing sick and tired of manually filtering hundreds of spam comments every day because the b2 spam filter wasn't catching them.

The one drawback to WordPress is that it is not a multi-blog blogging utility. This was important in my initial decision a year ago to use b2 rather than WordPress; it is less important to me now. I really did not write in my other blogs that often. Occasionally, I wrote in my "film journal" blog, and occasionally I published in my "fiction" blog, but mostly I wrote within my main blog. It may be that using categories can take the place of multiple blogs.

Also, WordPress offers a feature called "Pages" that basically turns WordPress into a simple web design application like a stripped down Dreamweaver. You can create a page for your profile, and it is a static web page, not a blog entry. This could conceivably be a better format than a blog for film reviews and fiction anyway.

The site is still in the "test and fix" stage. I'll deploy this weekend, or sooner if my b2 site is reenabled. I'd like to have all my posts from 2003 to the present available at once, but if my b2 site is still down I'll probably go ahead and launch the new site this weekend. I can always import my old posts at a later date.