I’ve been blogging for little over four years now. The first blog entry was on Apr 8, 2005 on weblogs.java.net/blog/arungupta. A new blog was born on Aug 2, 2005 on blogs.sun.com/arungupta. While java.net blog was focused exclusively on technical entries, blogs.sun.com also talked a lot about personal stuff as well. Both blogs.sun.com and java.net teams have done a stupendous job providing my first ever blogging platform ever. I learned a lot during the process and will always remain thankful to them for that. blogs.sun.com provide a fair amount of look-and-feel customization and java.net somewhat basic (although it seems to be changing). But here are few things that I never encountered being an end-user:
- What does it involve to manage and administer a blog server ?
- How to leverage the "community innovation" with pluggability, extensibility, themes, and other stuff in the blogging world ?
- How to have complete control (including hosting, domain, installation, upgrade, etc) over your blog ?
- What issues are involved in ensuring high availability of a blog ?
- What are the "joys" of running a blog on personal domain ?
- Who knows what future has in store ? It’s easier to deal with uncertainty this way
So taking these issues into consideration, I’ve decided that my primary blog going forward will be blog.arungupta.me. That does not mean that I’ll stop publishing content to "blogs.sun.com/arungupta" or "weblogs.java.net/blog/arungupta" immediately. But it’s going to be expensive (mostly in terms of resources) to maintain multiple blogs. I can ensure that all the content will be published on "blog.arungupta.me" first, and slowly exclusively here only. So if you are reading this entry on blog.arungupta.me, you are already at the right location 
Yep, it’s hosted on a personal domain running Wordpress 2.8 using GoDaddy for domain and Wordpress hosting. Got a good deal for multi-year Wordpress hosting with them and have been happy and satisfied with their customer service so far. A comparison between different Wordpress hosting services is also useful. For the new blog, I’ve customized a theme (more on that in a subsequent blog) and added few plug-ins to have a nice user experience.
All the content (blog entries, resources, and comments) from "blogs.sun.com/arungupta" is migrated to this blog and is live for the past few days. There is very little and now stale content (dated Apr 8 – Aug 1 2005) on "weblogs.java.net/blog/arungupta" that is not migrated to the new blog. Other than that, you’ll continue to experience the same richness, diversity, and depth of blog entries on the new blog.
Here is what you need to do to ensure a continued delivery of the content:
- If you subscribe to "http://feeds.feedburner.com/MilesToGo", then you are taken care of because the underlying blog has been updated to reflect the change.
- If you subscribe to "http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/feed/entries/atom" or "http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/feed/entries/rss" then update the URL to "http://feeds.feedburner.com/MilesToGo".
- If you subscribe to "http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/feed/comments/atom" or "http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/feed/comments/rss" then update the URL to "http://blog.arungupta.me/comments/feed/".
- If you read the blog on web, then change your bookmarks to "http://blog.arungupta.me".
- For IE and Firefox users, you can add a custom search engine to search this blog by right-clicking on the top-left corner in Search Engines/Providers drop-down and selecting "Miles to go …". Make sure the photograph in the text matches the one displayed in the top-right corner of new blog.
Feel free to drop a comment on this blog with your thoughts / suggestions on how to make the experience better.
Elated by the joys of running a blog on a personal domain, visit at blog.arungupta.me
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