Douglas Purdy

I just completed a move of douglaspurdy.com.

I was using wordpress.com for hosting previously, but I decided to move to a different provider so I could have more control over the environment.

I had considering asking the WordPress folks to give me a little more control, but I decided this that it was better option to get ssh access some place.  That and the fact that Scoble, who I pinged to figure out how he worked his magic on his site, didn’t get back to me until this week.  Apparently he only answers email when outside the US.

Long story short, I got myself my first official LAMP hoster.  I have always used Windows Server hosting before.  After a long selection process  (actually I just wrote a random selection program, as that has as much chance of making a ‘good’ selection as reading all the google searches in the world), I selected Media Template aka (mt).  I suppose that they use (mt) as their name since they are based out of LA, making them automatically hip and therefore legally entitled to use just shortcuts.

After a quick setup, I configured MySQL and a Wordpress instance.  (mt) only has 2.3 or some ancient version available as a 1-click install, so I needed to do my own 2.7 install.  I then moved all my content over.  It was completely trivial (as trivial as working remotely over ssh can be).  Really.

Well, not really.  One issue that remains is the fact that my images are still on the wordpress.com site, as they are not part of the generalized export/import.  But other than that, really.

I have to tell you that this experience is calling into question some basic assumptions that I have had around how the software industry is going to work over the course of the next couple of years.  More on that later (as I think more or I just forget it and you do too).