I’m thinking about moving this blog.  I started in August of 2001 on blogger.  At some point, I migrated to Movable Type, and then, a few years ago, I migrated to WordPress.  Along the way I’ve spent a little time blogging abroad on both LiveJournal and Salon’s blog community and some day I may merge those posts with the posts here.

These days I’m looking at renting over on WordPress.com. I’m curious about what it will be like plugging this blog into the community there and I wouldn’t mind turning the building maintenance over to someone else for a while.

It should be easy to do.  It’s simple matter to export my posts off my own server and import them into theirs.  They’ll let me continue using the geekfun.com domain, so I should be able to make the transition seamless for my existing readers, and I’ll be able to make another seamless transition if I want to self host again in the future.

I’ll have to give up my Google ads, which isn’t a big deal since they aren’t bringing in much money.  I’ll also have to give up the traffic trackers I have now.  WordPress.com has nice stats, but I’d like to maintain continuity.  The big unknown is that a lot of my posts are marked up using Textile, which relies on a plugin to generate ordinary HTML that WordPress.com doesn’t seem to support.  I’ll probably have to write a converter if someone else hasn’t already created one.

I actually tried to do a dry run importing my blog tonight, and it didn’t work very well.  WordPress.com timed out a few times, and now things are all screwed up.  I’ll have to check in with their support on Monday, to get them to clear things out and see if there is anything to do differently before I try again.

My main interest in all of this is to see if plugging in to the wordpress.com community will result in new viewership for my blog.  If it does, I’ll do the same with one of my wife’s blogs, to incubate it.