The WordPress installation was not a problem.  But the version of MySQL on my host was too old, which meant I had to migrate my site to a newer box, which broke email, and meant I had to reinstall spamassassin.  There’s a name for starting out wanting to change blogging tools and ending up reinstalling your spam filter.  It’s called yak shaving.

I’ve shaved yaks before, of course, but this time was special.  I hadn’t even wanted to change blogging platforms in the first place — I’d been forced to by Blogger’s change.  That means that this yak was all hair.

Let me emphasize that the actual WordPress installation process was quick and painless.  When I tried to install on my old host, the installer immediately noticed that my version of MySQL wasn’t up to date and refused to run.  Once I had a suitable host, the 5-minute install worked like a charm.  And importing all my old Blogger posts was just a matter of a few clicks in the “Tools” section of the WordPress dashboard.  Best of all, things to some advice from this article, I’ve even managed to preserve all my old URLs.

So I’m back up and running with a shiny new blogging tool, with only a few hours of downtime.   Maybe the shiny tool means I’ll blog more often.  Stay tuned.

Excecpt for this weekend, when I’m in Champaign-Urbana for the Second Worldwide Four-Square Invitational Conference (actually a multi-class reunion for University High School). I’ll be here in Champaign until the afternoon of Sunday the 20th of July.

Today my life resembles George Carlin’s “A Place for My Stuff” routine, as I had to pack up a subset of the stuff I took to Chicago, and bring it to Champaign. “The third version of my house,” as he calls it.

If you’re in Champaign or Chicago, and would like to get together, drop me an email.