I can’t tell you how many times I’ve imagined writing this post. Well, the time has finally come – I’m packing my blog and moving it off of blogs.msdn.com. http://www.Artificialignorance.net will no longer redirect to http://blogs.msdn.com/aniyer.

Why am I moving?

Simple – I wanted more control over my blog. Blogs.msdn.com and community server have been great, but I seem to need more than the capabilities that community server gives me in terms of manageability and customization.

While Microsoft doesn’t care that I use my blog to write about things unrelated to Microsoft, there have been readers who’ve asked me why I write about  wanting to marry Kaavya Vishwanathan, for example.

I’ve been wanting to use WordPress forever now. I’ve heard personally from Matt as well as from other sources about how good the engine is, how the user base is growing so rapidly, the availability of all these 3rd party plugins etc. etc. (not to mention the ability to use Facebook Connect for my commenters to leave comments on my blog via Disqus) Microsoft and the IIS team in particular has been investing a lot of time in PHP on IIS7 and Windows Server 2008, and I want to put our theories in to practice.

With my blog setup the way it is, if I ever need to move my content again there will be absolutely no impact to my readers.

Where has the best blog on the planet moved to?

Blog URL : http://www.Artificialignorance.net/blog

RSS/ATOM : http://feeds.feedburner.com/artificialignorance

My blog engine is running WordPress on IIS7 on Windows Server 2008 with MySQL as the database and is hosted by GoDaddy. I’d initially tinkered with GoGrid and their cloud computing offering to host the blog. However, I realized after spending about 3 hours that I’d customized their default Windows Server 2008 32-bit image with PHP5 so much so that spinning up another instance (if I ever had to) would be a giant PITA. However, huge hat-tip to the GoGrid team – their UI is intuitive and easy to use. Amazon Web Services was kind of a no-go because I really wanted to use Windows Server 2008.

I also played with WebHost4Life quite a bit as their pricing seemed very lucrative. However, I ran in to the perennial wordpress permalinks with IIS issue and was morally opposed to having to pay $5 extra/month just to have Custom 404 Error Pages (long story).

It is my goal to move over to using Azure when Azure is ready with PHP (and MySQL).

What happens to blogs.msdn.com/aniyer?

It is blogs.msdn.com policy to retain (meaningful) content, so all my old (meaningful) content will still be on blogs.msdn.com/aniyer. However, since our community server installation doesn’t support BlogML yet, I’ve been working on extracting my posts (sans the comments) and pushing them to artificialignorance.net. Eventually, all my content will move over (with little disruption to you as the reader).

That said, moving forward I will be adding posts to blogs.msdn.com/aniyer and in the body, simply linking back to the original post on artificialignorance.net with a disclaimer. I plan on doing this for the next six months or so.

See you over at Artificialignorance.net, yo.

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