It’s been about 1 year, 8 months, 19 days since I lost memerocket.com. In the interim I ran this blog at meme-rocket.com.

Numerous issues kept me from moving it back to the original domain. First, of course, there was the fact that I didn’t have control of the domain at all for three months. When I did regain control in the summer of ‘07 I was right in the middle of the Oregon move. By then I’d been posting away and it just never seemed like a good time to switch back.

If you know me, you know I’ve got lots of opinions about what’s good and bad about our various online communication tools such as blogs, email, Twitter, forums. What better way to test some of those ideas than to um, write a prototype and then uh, use that prototype. So as ‘07 neared its end I made a little pact with myself that I wasn’t going to blog until I did so on my own stinking blogging platform (one I’d created).

Well what with the day job and design school and the family and all, that progress was slow. However in September, ‘08 I did launch a first cut as part of the Thought Propulsion corporate site. If you look at the blog tab there is a beginning there. Not a lot of the functionality is exposed yet and my assessment is that to expose a whole lot more is gonna take a whole lot more work. Go figure.

While all this was going on, my WordPress installation at TextDrive (the one running meme-rocket.com) got upgraded about once and was in need of another upgrade. I kept putting it off because I loathe upgrading WordPress. It makes me crazy that “themes” are not isolated from the rest of the system. It’s crazy that a WordPress upgrade cannot be push-button.

So I decided to go ahead and kill a few birds with a big hammer and set up a shiny new wordpress.com blog on my original domain. That’s what you’re reading now. I’m feeling great about this decision so far since:

  1. I was able to use my own domain—yay!

  2. I was able to reclaim my original domain

  3. I was able (using my DNS provider dnsmadeeasy.com) to HTTP (permanent) redirect meme-rocket.com to memerocket.com

  4. I never again have to upgrade WordPress

A few minutes after upgrading I received a positive message from The Universe in the form of a wordpress.com alert on my dashboard. It said that the system was going to be upgraded to version 2.7 in 23 minutes. And guess what. I didn’t have to back up my files or my database. And I didn’t have to do anything but refresh my browser to enjoy the sweet new UI.

On the downside I’m sure I’ll miss some customization features. More on those as I run into them. For now though, I feel like I got my old megaphone back. Get ready for some blasts. Ahem! And what of that early ‘08 pledge to roll my own. Well we’ll just have to see about that…