For the last year or so I’ve been hosting my web site on my own server in my house.  I built the site using some of the software technology I use at work, partially out of an experiment, and partially to save a little bit of money. 

A few days ago, I had a disk failure on one of my computers, and while I was fixing it this morning, I realized that a) while I was working on the server, my site was down; b) I wasn’t entirely sure I had all the firewall settings set properly, and that there was a chance, however remote, that someone could hack into my home network via this web site; and c) The cost of getting the site up and running on WordPress was about $12 a year. 

It took me the better part of the afternoon to manually load all of my old posts from my custom site into WordPress, and then to get familiar with the WordPress interface.  I can’t say I like the look and the feel of this site as much as I did on my old site, where I had custom made backgrounds, but I think the current style is pretty sharp and easy to read.

I also know that a writer looking for a reason to procrastinate can justify doing just about anything in order not to write, and apparently, I needed a reason today.  My first excuse came at 6:15 AM when I realized none of my computers had been backing up for the last week, and one had gone almost a month without a backup.  Once you have been through losing a hard drive, an alert that says your backups are failing never goes unheeded.  That led to restoring the rest of the files lost in the crash, and then to moving the site,

So anyway, the site is now moved and up, and most things are working, and I may add more features as time goes on.

Tomorrow I meet with my writing group, and we get back to prepping our entries for the 2011 PNWA Writing Contest.  I also need to touch base with the agent I sent The Forgotten Road to a couple of months ago to see if  they need a little more time.  It’s time to do the next major edit on Army of the Risen as well, so Labeled may take a bit of a break, not that I’d got a lot of momentum going on it anyway.  It’s around 8500 words, and I keep getting interrupted.  I still really like the story, but life (and other books) just keeps getting in the way.  That needs to change, soon.