Jason Clarke's personal blog

In case anyone that reads this is curious, my old blog at www.jasonclarke.net is back online. To quote John Hodgeman, that is all!

RSS feed change - my original blog at jasonclarke.net will be brought back online on the new server ASAP. In the mean time I've switched my FeedBurner feed to point to my VOX blog. Once everything is back to normal, my feed will switch back. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Crap - my blog's down. My personal blog, that is - the one at jasonclarke.net.

I've been freeloading on hosting from my brother-in-law for a few years now, and he finally decided to ditch 1and1 (who had the worst uptime I've ever seen) for something better. Of course, life got in the way and I lost track of the date, and now the old server has been shut down.

Now to find out how much a my have lost - my latest backup wasn't *too* old, but you never know...

We returned home from an overnight visit at a family friend's place for New Years to discover that our furnace was not working. Once I figured out that the pilot light was going strong, and the furnace made a click sound when the thermostat was moved above or below the current temperature, I decided that something must really be wrong and called the company that had serviced our furnace a few months ago.

From my description, they figure it must be a bad gas valve (which is electromagnetically controlled - thus the clicks I heard). The estimate to fix it is $300 - of course that's without actually looking at it, so we'll have to see how that goes. Being that it was the first of January yesterday, there would be an additional $100 fee for a call that day. Considering we live near Vancouver, BC, and the climate here is typically mild, we decided to rough it for a night.

Last night was somewhat chilly, but manageable, and the furnace guy will be coming to work on it tonight at 5pm. So we'll see how that goes.

Although I haven't posted too much here, I can't seem to let go of this blog; I come back and explore Vox every few weeks, and decide that it's a very well done interface that I'd like to continue with.

So here's the problem.

What do I do with my www.jasonclarke.net blog that is somewhat directionless, but has a significant amount of Google juice built up? I'm liking the idea of moving to a hosted platform where I don't need to worry about the geeky details of upgrading for features or security reasons - that should be somebody else's responsibility.

I hope all have had some wonderful holidays. For me I have the equivalent of a long weekend left, and then it's back to the daily grind. Luckily, I like my job, so as much as I'd rather have more time home with my family, it's not terrifying to face the prospect of heading back to work, like it has been in previous years.

Well, look at this. I hadn't really intended on starting up another blog, when I've already got my personal blog - J.P.C. Jason Clarke - going, but I'd heard so many good things about VOX that when Victor offered up an invite, I couldn't help but take him up on it.

And I must say, I'm definitely impressed. VOX seems to include all of those "social networking" features in a way that just makes sense. It's easy to navigate, easy to use, and full of features - much more so than the other blogging platforms I've used. While I'm still a huge WordPress fan, and would choose it in a heartbeat for a self-managed blog, there's some nice peace of mind when I consider the idea of just letting the team at Six Apart (makers of VOX) take care of the back-end nonsense.

I'm going to have to consider this. I'm not sure I could throw away my regular traffic and pagerank, but it sure is tempting. Good on ya, VOX!