To Squarespace.com and Beyond!

As you’ve probably noticed if you’re one of the 10 people who don’t browse the site for less than 40 seconds (that’s 99% of the traffic), the URL has changed and the design too. I’ve moved all my content over from the dedicated Win 2008 server running N2 to Squarespace.com, saving me about £25 a month.

I wasn’t that keen on the domain name of the old site, and it was hosted on a virtual dedicated server which was a waste of money for the traffic I get. I did consider doing this a few years ago when I moved to N2, but at the time no blog engines had what I needed for the site.

Fortunately they now do, markdown is supported by all blog sites along with some HTML support and generous amounts of bandwidth and disk space. Being able to post your own HTML and upload your own Javascript, XAPs, and tinker with the CSS/JS/HTML is fairly important for a develop blog though, I tried out Posterous, Tumblr, WordPress-hosted and Typepad and settled with Squarespace as they let you do whatever you want to your site, bar server-side processing. I think Squarespace is probably the slickest CMS system I’ve used, they’ve definitely got a good UI team hidden away in New York.

In the site move I’ve culled the PHP and Perl snippets - no tears shed there - and lost a few of the tools - the syntax highlighter, network tools, google postcode parser and the docy subdomain. There’s better tools out there on the web so no real loss.

Apart from the price change, the biggest improvement of my new hosted CMS/Blog setup is not having to worry about backups or downtime. The ‘screw this’ moment that made me move was my old server’s application pools suddenly stopping for a day last month where I couldn’t remote desktop in to restart them and a server reboot would’ve taken 4 hours. It all seemed to be a bit of a waste of my life fiddling with IIS for something as trivial as a blog.

So now I’m all setup and ready to blog, blog, blog - get ready for at least a post a month!

I'm Chris Small, a software engineer working in London. This is my tech blog. Find out more about me via Github, Stackoverflow, Resume