Blessed by the Potato

So the big news is that I have gone out and purchased actual webhosting from DreamHost (hatip: CC). The idea is that it would let me stop having to deal with server issues (which thankfully have been astoundingly rare considering the dinosaur I have under my desk powering the site), and also make the site more easily indexed by The Google, plus fix some of the issues I was unable to resolve with the RSS feed.

This has been the plan for some time — ever since I first started putting ads up. I know I’ll never make money with BbtP (certainly not enough to hire staff writers!) due in no small part to the fact that I don’t really write for a commercialized audience (I don’t stay on topic, I’m verbose, I have a sick proclivity for parentheses, and I don’t stick to a schedule), but I was hoping to pull in enough to cover the hosting costs at least. Sadly, I just don’t have the readership for that — right now my full year ad revenues are adding up to be enough to cover approximately 3 days of hosting.

Fortunately, my dad gave me some money for no reason at all, and just told me to spend it, so I got the hosting plan.

As of right now I have bumped the blog directory from /blog to the root of holypotato.net (an additional domain to holypotato.com), which I think is a good long-term organizational move. However, that means that I have broken every single link within my posts (i.e., those links referring to other posts). External links should be ok if they were using the permalinks I was putting at the bottom of posts, but I know that at least a few people linking back here were cut & pasting from their browser’s URL (which would have been the IP, which was doomed to change sooner or later anyway).

So right now I have the two domains acting separately: .com is still hosted on my PIII under my desk, and .net is at DreamHost (with all the broken links). Hopefully by January I’ll have fixed things up and merged the two domains so that no matter which one you choose to use to visit me they get you to the same place. Hopefully, I won’t break anyone’s RSS feed in the process.