Clearing the mouth balls

It has been a long time since my last post. A combination of factors and priories have made blogging take a back seat. Since there is never a better time than now to do something you want to I am reincarnating my blog.

The key driver was the impending renewal of my hosting contract. Rather than renew I have decided to look for online solutions that at least for the current term can be used to host the dwindling number of services that were being run from the online hosting, most notably a small source control repository, an image gallery, and this blog.
  • The Source control solution I'm currently reviewing Bitbucket from Atlassian which seems to meet my needs on the freebie version at the moment.
  • For the image gallery I'm currently reviewing Smugmug which has a fair amount of customization capabilities and supports reading caption and geo-tagged data from my uploaded pictures. It also supports custom DNS on the non professional contracts.
  • For blogging I have decided to give Blogger a go considering it allows custom DNS for free and has been quick and painless to setup. As a plus the Android app seems good enough to use as an editor to crank out some basic content and reclaim some lost time commuting to work.
  • For online backup and storage I've been reviewing IDrive which so far has been more reliable and consistent than some other solutions that I have tested in the past. For storage I am undecided and am still reviewing Google Drive, Microsoft Sky Drive, and Dropbox and have managed to consolidate on a single solution for my needs.
Migrating content has actually been rather fun reminding me of some of my previous trips and some of the challenges I have posted solutions to in the past. The migration will be complete on or before June 10th as that is when my hosting contract is up. I plan to have things up to full speed by the middle of the summer with new content and a more regular posting schedule.

Nick
Location: Upminster

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