The End is Near!

But the Blog goes on!

Say good-bye to Blogger

As February 12 approaches we, and that I mean the staff at Roadside Mysteries, have felt the need to change our publishing platform after 2 years of blogging with the device known as "BLOGGER" (See logo above). While we found it to be a useful and fairly simple blog interface, the current trend seems to be more toward a robust server-sided application that we could mess around with (not to mention be current with all the local blogs in the area).

More important, the folks at BLOGGER are planning to shut down FTP support for their user base and claim that only 0.5% of active blogs are published via FTP (FTP, or File Transfer Protocol lets you transfer files over the internet). FTP has been around a while; The first time the Bugman used it was in 1978 when he worked at Gould Electronics.

This blog uses FTP data transfers, therefore we could either:

1) Begin using the BLOGGER MIGRATION TOOL due to be available on February 22.

2) Switch to some other publishing tool.

Since either option means learning something new, we decided to go with option #2 and see what happens. So we have decided to go with...

Say hello to WordPress

WordPress is maybe 4 years younger than BLOGGER and it seems that of all the open source blog publishers out there, it appears to be the most widely used. What really sold us on WordPress was the installation. We usually dread this process because we do not install on our server very often and we easily forget the process (like setting up MySQL and importing PHP files; when's the last time we did that?) But the installation process was super easy! If the rest of the package is anywhere near as good as the installer, we're going to have a party!

Anyhow, if you want to see the new blog before the opening date, you can go here. It will probably change a few times in the next few weeks, but it's there for the world to see.

We picked February 12 as the GO-TO date because it will be the 2nd anniversary of this blog. The original blog HTML code and images will be retained on our server and it will exist as an archive. The blog URL will re-direct you to the new blog on the 12th of February. Get ready for it!

Everyday Heroes 2008

98 01 32 W 43 42 53 N

Corn. The arrow shows where the banjo player stood on this day at 8:37 am.