All Change, Please

UPDATE 20/10/2023: the new site can now be seen in “preview release mode” at https://snowhenge.squarespace.com. There are a still few things to tidy up before I transfer the domain name permanently.

This is my last post here.

To be more specific, “here” will soon no longer be here.  After several years of dithering, I have decided that I do want to maintain an internet presence, and I do want to continue writing and updating content. But I want to optimise my time towards content, not website design, construction and maintenance, so I have decided to cut the cord and move to Squarespace.  Squarespace is expensive for a pure “vanity site” like this, but so is my current arrangement. And Squarespace does all the heavy lifting for me.  I also considered Wix in its various forms, by the way, and it would have won, were it not for two things: it doesn’t support multiple blogs, and I’d already invested considerable effort in an aborted SQ migration two years ago, and I could just pick up where I left off. But otherwise I feel Wix is a better option.

What I do lose is a backend database on which I can build ultra-flexible pages, but a lot of complexity goes hand in hand with that.  Also most of the file upload and layout is manual and quite repetitive, instead of automated. But then again a lot can go wrong with automation.

I’ve migrated the last two years blog posts, and I’ll gradually add a curated set of older articles. I’ve also migrated the full set of “Photo Diaries” even though nobody looks at them. I’ve taken the opportunity to refresh and streamline the Galleries.

Hopefully now, SQ will handle cross-device issues gracefully, which is very hard to do when you roll your own.

So, in the not too distant future, http://www.snowhenge.net will take you somewhere else. Hope to see you there.  For the foreseeable future, this version will remain, though not updated, as http://www.davidmantripp.com.

a glimpse of the future

One last thing - a huge thank you to David at meirhosting.net for reliable web hosting and especially fantastic support over all these years.  If you need Webhosting or domain name registration, you couldn’t make a better choice, especially if you (unlike me) are in the UK.