Today I spent some time upgrading my installation of WordPress to the most recent (2.04) as well as installing some new plugins and updating others. All of this is in anticipation of migrating this web log from the CapMac server to my new host (WireNine) where my new domain is waiting.

Along with migrating this blog to the new site I hope to be more timely in my posts here. To keep me honest I’ll encourage several friends to visit and hopefully that will provide the necessary inspiration (or guilt) to be more proactive in my efforts to chronicle things that others might find interesting.

It’s easy for a half hour of WordPress maintenance to turn into an afternoon, not because it’s complex or difficult, but because there are so many cool plugins to explore and experiment with. When I see a cool WordPress blog that has a feature I’d like to have it’s time for a search of the WordPress Plugin Database. Inevitably I find not only what I am looking for but several other items that I can’t pass up.
If you’d like to see which plugins are currently installed at Rancho Chase click on the link in the sidebar which generates a list in real time with download links. Also, if you’d like to keep up with what’s new on a daily basis (I call this the “VersionTracker Syndrome”) add the RSS feed for newly added WordPress plugins to your newsreader.

And you know what? It was even simpler than the WordPress docs promised. They claim a 5 minute installation. Mine took about 3. Exporting my content from Movable Type to WordPress took another two. What an amazingly pleasant experience! We need to make it this easy for Windows users to switch to Macintosh.

After refreshing this long dormant weblog I came to a quick realization that the version of Movable Type I installed in 2003 to power it is long out of date. A lot has happened in the Movable Type world since I downloaded and installed version 2.64 as an experiment and used it to record a daily journal of our family’s summer trip to Disney World.

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I am always impressed by people who have the time and dedication to update their weblogs regularly. Those who do it daily truly amaze me because they are demonstrating not only organization but a commitment to provide their readers with something new and presumably interesting on an ongoing basis every 24 hours.

As mentioned earlier, my standard excuse for not posting regularly to this space is that the bulk of my online time is spent at the online forums for the user group I am President of, Capitol Macintosh. If you want a big dose of my opinions, head over there and budget some time because the number of my posts is approaching a thousand.

But I found a new application today by the author of Kung-Log which I hope will motivate me to update this blog more frequently. It’s called Ecto.