I found two articles this morning that attempt to explain what “microblogging” is:

• Microblogging Defined (via @rjeffries on identi.ca)
• Identi.Ca (from @oddbloke on identi.ca)

I succumbed to Facebook a while ago, and the thing I like best about it is keeping up with peoples status messages. So I decided to try out Twitter on the basis that it was just the status message bit of Facebook, but open to anyone to read. I was also drawn to Twitter because a couple of my favourite blogs (ongoing and Music Thing) started posting links and one-liners to Twitter instead of to their main blog.

Then, thanks to Robert Rees, I found identi.ca, which is an open-source take on the same idea. A lot of people who use multiple microblogging services post the same thing to each one (there are easy ways to do this, such as ping.fm). I have stolen Robert’s idea of posting different things to each service: techy and geeky stuff gets posted to identi.ca, more general stuff gets posted to Twitter. However, I am currently piping both of them into Facebook to update my status there, and also showing both of them here in my blog sidebar.

If you are a techy sort of person, I’d say it was worthwhile having a play with microblogging. I have found interesting people to follow on both Twitter and identi.ca, and learned a bunch of useful stuff by doing so. However, neither of them are as good as Facebook for simply keeping up with friends.

So it looks like Sun aren’t going to do any more work to enhance or improve Swing. It’s kind of sad, but not entirely unexpected. I can’t help feeling that multiplatform GUI libraries are a dead end. Depending on what they are doing, what most people want is either a browser interface, or a fully native GUI on their platform of choice. Little differences from what you expect, such as in shortcut keys or menu placements, become annoying rather quickly. Swing never quite got them right, and I’m not convinced any other multiplatform GUI library does, despite the fact that people have been trying to solve this problem for over 15 years. It feels like it’s time to give up on it. I don’t think Flash, AIR, JavaFX or Silverlight is the answer either. A native GUI will always feel better to use than any of these, and a browser interface will always be far easier to manage.

Well, here we are, Welcome to the Cheap Seats has found a new home. I took your advice and moved to WordPress.com. I toyed with the idea of getting a new hosting provider and setting it all up myself, but decided against it in the end. WordPress.com has limitations (lack of Markdown for starters), but for now I’d rather live with them than have to worry about managing my own server.

Moving the data over proved rather easier than I expected. I set up my categories on WordPress, created some dummy entries, then exported the blog to see what the WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) export format looked like. I then found a handy Ruby script which claimed to generate a WXR file from a Typo blog. I had to hack it a little to make it work: my version of Typo was so old it didn’t have the published_at property, so I had to change it to use the created_at property instead. Then when it had generated the WXR file, I did some edits on it to make sure the categories and author matched what was in WordPress. But once that was done, WordPress imported the WXR file without complaint, and everything seems to be here, even the comments. The only problem I’ve found so far was with HTML in the title of one post, which was easy to fix manually. Please let me know if you spot any other oddities.

It could be the last time I’ll ever blog here at least. Planet Argon, the company that hosts this blog, is moving upmarket, and the cheap hosting option for Typo that I’ve had for the last couple of years is being discontinued. I can of course migrate to Planet Argon’s shiny, new, virtualised Boxcar hosting service. If I were running a serious Ruby on Rails site a Boxcar would make a lot of sense, but even the cheapest Boxcar option is a lot of money just for a personal blog.

So, what should I do? My first option is to stop blogging and simply close down the site. I haven’t written much this year anyway; I haven’t had a lot of time for writing, and the things on my mind that I might have written about haven’t been the sort of stuff I want to publish here. I’m not expecting those factors to change much over the next year, so maybe the time has come to bow out from blogging.

My second option is to look for another Ruby on Rails hosting provider, and migrate everything across. This would keep everything intact, but would require me to really get to grips with Rails deployment, Typo installation and backup/restore of MySQL databases. Right now that feels like too much work to contemplate, but maybe I’m being too pessimistic.

My third option is to start using a public blogging service such as Blogger or WordPress.com. I should be able to get the existing articles moved over to one of those, but I’ll probably not be able to transfer the comments. On the other hand this will save me money on hosting fees and probably be the most hassle-free solution to maintain.

Your ideas and comments would be most welcome.