It looks like most features of the core loonyboi.com sites are back up and running — in some cases much, much better than before. It took an awful lot of work on my part, which just goes to show why I only do this sort of thing every few years.

Over the years I’ve had only a few hosts for my ever-expanding collection of sites, and I really only switch in extreme circumstances. In this case, I just jumped on a mind-bogglingly good hosting offer. POE Hosting has been very good to me for the last few years. They put up with my often-times bizarre support questions, were willing to deal with more than one Slashdotting (the best was when IF Quake went live…that crushed the server…it was great), and generally they have been great hosts. But DreamHost just offered me a great deal more for a great deal less.

To give you an idea of how much more, I’ll just say that I now have quite literally 300 times more storage space than I had before. Plus they offer a lot more control over the server than I’ve ever been able to do. I mean good god, they let users install their own Perl modules! So yeah, that was pretty good. But the clincher is the fact that I got two years of hosting with all these new perks for a lot less than POE Hosting’s one year fee. So it was a tough decision, but I don’t regret it at all.

As for the switch from Movable Type to WordPress, that’s something I’d been considering for a while now. Anyone who’s posted a comment here before knows that it’s been somewhat buggy. But there’s more to it than that…as a company, SixApart seems to have been more interested in new services (like VOX) than improving Movable Type. I gave up waiting for the new features added in TypePad to make their way back into MT, but I was really surprised when I saw that VOX doesn’t even use TypeKey, their supposedly universal login system. I paid for MT when it went semi-commercial, and I don’t regret that (I used it for almost four years, after all), but WordPress is just an all-around better system these days. Plus it’s built around PHP and MySQL, two things that I’m generally much better at than Perl.

Which isn’t to say that it was an easy transition. WordPress does make it really easy to import posts, which is great, and there are some handy tips out there for doing server-side trickery to redirect users and search engines, but I still had a heck of a time getting it to look the way I wanted it to. As you can see from the site (assuming you’re reading this in a browser, and not an RSS aggregator), I like things nice and simple. WordPress tend to be either flashy (um, no), Web 2.0-ey (I don’t think so) or (shudder) colorful. I decided to keep some color, but for the most part, I’m sticking to black and white.

The one thing WordPress doesn’t do particularly well is RSS feeds, so I’m working on that. You should now be seeing full stories in the feed, and I’m working on getting comments back in there as well. I never quite understood the rationale behind post-specific RSS feeds, so I ditched that. I’ll get one uber-feed going as soon as I can.

Anyway, there’s still work to do, so I’m going back to it. By the way, if you’re thinking of signing up for Dreamhost, use this link or click on the sidebar there…they have a pretty cool referral program (this will be my one and only plug for that, I promise).