I prefer my web presence to be somewhere I have more control of my personal data. I highly doubt I'll miss it since I never particularly liked it to begin with. Let our blogs live on.

Trying to find honest reviews of web hosts is next to impossible. Do a search on Google and you get a ton of spammy, referral sites. The Web Hosting Talk forum is probably the best resource for real reviews from users. After doing some reading there I came across this thread: StableHost - 50% Off For Life - cPanel and LiteSpeed - US & Europe Locations. Further research found nothing but glowing reviews for StableHost and practically nothing negative.

I opted for their middle hosting plan (5GB/100GB, free domain) which drops to $5.45 if you sign up for a year at a time. With the WHT50 coupon you get 50% off for life which makes a whole year of hosting with domain name come out to $32.72. If you offered me hosting for $2.75 a month I'd probably ask what the catch is. Turns out there is no catch, just great hosting.

After signing up and switching over this site, I noticed an immediate increase in speed. Pages in the WordPress admin area would take a couple seconds to start loading and just seemed a little sluggish on LunarPages. The exact same install on StableHost is fast, really fast. I don't think I've seen WordPress run this fast before. I attribute this to nice servers that have not been oversold. The middle hosting plan only gets you 5GB of space and 100GB of transfer, but that is more realistic than a host offering unlimited space and bandwidth for 5 bucks. That just leads to overutilization and slow servers.

Performance is also helped by the use of Lightspeed instead of Apache. Lightspeed is a commercial web server that offers improved performance over Apache, but the extra cost probably keeps it from being more popular on shared hosts.

I've only had previous experience with GoDaddy, ResellerZoom and LunarPages, but I would choose StableHost over them and any other shared web host in a heartbeat. Throw in the free domain name and the hosting technically only costs about $23 a year. The WHT50 coupon could end at anytime so I'd jump on it if you are considering a new host or moving hosts.

Seriously good hosting for $2.75 a month - use WHT50 coupon

I think a big part of this migration is that the barrier to posting is very low on Facebook and the audience is quick to reach. I don't mind seeing what people did last night or checking out some of their photos, but I don't expect to have any deep discussions on Facebook. There's little incentive for people to post anything too meaningful because as soon it drops off the front page of everyone's News Feed it is essentially lost forever. Posts and comments on a blog are much more permanent and easily retrieved. I could easily find a blog post from last year, but I don't think I'd be able to find a Status Update from last year. Why invest time in creating content that might as well be deleted after it reaches an age of one week?

Of the 18 or so blogs on my Blogroll, I'd say only 5 or 6 could be considered active. All the people who's blogs are dead are active on Facebook. That seems like fairly good evidence that Facebook killed the casual blog. Not good or bad, it just is what it is.

I'm also experimenting with Facebook imports, so if you are seeing this on Facebook, come visit our blogs if you have never been before. My siblings have to fly under the radar at http://theblarg.com and http://myrighteousindignation.com/.

A while back I was trying to figure out a way to share those "shared" items with a wider audience. I stuck a link in the sidebar to my shared item page, but I doubt anybody uses it. What I really wanted to do was have WordPress automatically create posts with a link to the content I mark in Google Reader. The WP-o-matic plugin does exactly what I want.

Setting up the plugin involves creating a CRON job on the server and setting up a feed to check periodically. You can customize the content of the post that gets created; I opted for a little blurb and a link to the content. I wanted to modify the title that gets created which isn't an available option so I modified the plugin to do that for me. I also set it to save posts as drafts so I can assign a category and tags and maybe some of my thoughts before Google Reader gets a hold of it and caches it forever.

So these shared posts are really the cream of the crop of my subscriptions and I'd love to have people share things they find. I like the fact that whenever shared items show up in Google Reader from my friends they are of high quality and worth the read even though it might be outside my immediate area of interest.

The main issue I was having with categories is that I was using them to say what a post is about. For example, if I had a post about our wedding, it went in the Wedding category. But once our wedding was over I had like 10 posts sitting in a category that would never be added to. With tags I can place those posts into "Life Stuff" and tag it with wedding. The category becomes a general bucket and the tags describe exactly what the post is about.

I've made some theme changes and added a list of tags on each post. I went back through all my posts, recategorized them into my core categories and added tags. Now I have 8 categories and over 100 tags which will be much easier to manage and will keep me from trying to stuff my posts into overly specific categories.