So I’ve decided that it’s time to move on to a more advanced blogging solution. Blogger has been a good solution for me these past few years. One of the other sites I administer is still “Powered by Blogger,” and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Blogger is still where I’d direct someone who was interested in setting up their own blog, especially if they weren’t all that computer literate. But at this point I’m feeling a little constrained by the black box that is Blogger, and especially the inability to easily customize it.

My new blogging software will almost certainly be Typo, although WordPress is waiting in the wings if things don’t work out with Typo. I downloaded Typo 2.6.0, the stable release, and am experimenting with it at home. I was pleased at how easy it was to get Typo up and running, at least with the WEBrick server option. I downloaded Origami, the winner of a recent Typo themes contest, and it looks very nice indeed.

One issue that I’m going to have to deal with is what to do with the existing blog entries from my Blogger account. The first option is to just leave this blog as-is, and start from scratch with Typo. In that scenario, existing links to this blog (if they’re out there) won’t get broken. What I don’t know is how Typo will react if it’s presented with a URL for one of those older articles. A different option is to try to import the old articles into Typo. Typo doesn’t have a converter utility for Blogger blogs, but this guy has written about his experience in moving from Blogger to Typo, and describes (among other things) how he migrated his Blogger data to Typo using Typo’s RSS feed importing tool.

Another issue that I need to investigate is whether my ISP supports Typo. I know that they support Ruby and Rails, and worst case I can probably upload the Typo files to my account. I briefly considered switching to Planet Argon, which offers a really inexpensive Typo hosting plan, but they still haven’t responded to the inquiry that I e-mailed to them yesterday and I’m getting other reports that the service just isn’t there. And that’s too bad, since they’re probably nice folks, but what can you do? The only other ISP I would seriously consider switching to at this point is A Small Orange. I’m already hosting another web site there, and I’ve been pleased with the service and uptime.