Making the Move

You may have noticed I haven’t been posting much on this site of late. Or maybe you haven’t. Well, look, it’s been happening and we’re all just going to have to deal with it, okay?

The biggest reason is due to me writing a bunch of stuff for other places–be it at Amazin’ Avenue or the kinds of links you can see to your right (under MC Elsewhere). But there was another reason.

See, this site had been hosted by Go Daddy for a while. I can’t tell you why I chose them to begin with; perhaps I was swayed for their TOO SHOCKING FOR TV! ads. In any case, once you sign up with a host, it’s very, very easy to just stick with them until kingdom come. I even renewed my hosting account with them late-ish last year.

Then the safari kerfuffle happened, which caused many people to jump ship. I thought the whole thing was despicable, too, but I also thought I simply didn’t have the time to make a move. I felt stretched thin with my work, non-work, and family obligations, and adding a project like this to the pile seemed like pure insanity to me. I went through such an enormous hassle moving this site from Movable Type to WordPress in early 2011 that I didn’t have the stomach or the will to go through (what I assumed would be) a similar ordeal again. I felt crappy about my lack of action, but not so crappy that I did anything about it.

Then, SOPA. I’m sure you know what that is by now, and if you don’t, frankly, you don’t deserve to be on the internet. Suffice to say, Go Daddy was one of many high profile corporations who voiced support of SOPA, which I am one billion times against. I’m aware that A) SOPA is now dead, and B) Go Daddy eventually stepped back from their stance. However, they did so in such a tepid way you can easily see them changing their mind about this issue yet again when it’s convenient.

Because of SOPA and Go Daddy’s stance thereon, many people took their sites to greener pastures. And now, I was even busier than I was when Go Daddy did their last reprehensible thing. The pressure to make the move had never been greater, and the time available in which to do it had never been shorter.

One thing I keep harping on in my online writing (particularly at AA) is the media; specifically, their perceptions, their narratives, and the way they deal with the news. One thing that drives me nuts is how often members of the media take a certain tack because it’s the path of least resistance. Rather than investigate what is actually going on or the historical roots of whatever might be happening, they simply tap into what they think is going on, or what they think people will want to hear, because they’re lazy.

I realized that the longer I continued to host my site with Go Daddy, the closer I became to being one of Those People. I don’t have a right to criticize cheap expediency in others if I continue to support a company I disagree with immensely simply because I fear the hassle involved with leaving. Plus, there’s every reason to think I will be exponentially more time-crunched in the future. If I didn’t make a move now for schedule reasons, things are unlikely to improve on that front any time soon.

So I deliberately scaled back on the writing I did here at Scratchbomb, because I didn’t know how long the move would take and I didn’t want to add more stuff to the pile of things I needed to transfer. And because the less I wrote here, the less traffic I drove Go Daddy’s way.

Then I researched what it would take to get the transfer done, and it turned out it wasn’t that huge of a deal after all. So I got a new web host, moved my site over, and voila. There were a few hiccups along the way, but all were resolved in fairly short order. Now, the site you’re looking at is no longer hosted by Go Daddy. It all took way quicker than I thought, which makes me angry with myself for not doing it sooner.

I have to send enormous thank yous to Jeff Lyons, who walked me through the finer points of moving a WordPress site and answered way more questions than he really had to. He helped a lot back when I transferred my site from Movable Type to this environment, and he helped just as much now. I continue to be grateful.

It’s a small thing, really, which I should have taken care of much sooner than I did. But now it’s done, and I can write about the laziness and hypocrisy of others with a clean conscience. It’s a nice feeling.