Southend, Essex, England.

A test of the blog import process showed that it can work fine, but I need all of you set up as authors on the new blog first – the software needs somewhere to map all the existing posts to.

So what’s going to happen next is that I will send out invites to join to the email address that I have for you. This might not be for a day or two as I’m working around an electrician and a re-wiring job at the moment.

If you already have a wordpress.com account then you can use that. Simply tell me the email address that is associated with it and ignore the invite.

If you haven’t got a wordpress.com account then follow the joining instructions.

Feel free to look around Stills v3 and make a test comment with your wordpress.com account ID so that I can set you up as an approved commenter as well as an author. But please note that the blog isn’t live yet and all the existing test content will be taken down at some point.

Yes, the theme for Stills v3 isn’t ideal. But that’s something to work on later rather than a priority right now.

http://stillsv3.wordpress.com/

Stills v2 is still the place for new posts and comments until I indicate otherwise.

It looks like we have a solution for the future hosting of Stills. Keep posting here in the short term while I set everything up. I *ought* to be able to import everything in v2 into v3, so I will declare a 24 hour moratorium on posting and commenting at some point to make sure that stuff doesn’t fall between stools during the transfer.

There will be a couple of administrative changes, and I’ll be unable to customise the look of the site to the extent that I’ve been used to, but as it looks like wordpress.com is the way to go then the basic working of the site will be identical to what we have now. I’ll deal with administrative changes as we go along, but one that you should be aware of right now is that I will no longer be able to email all comments to all users automatically. Users who currently read comments via RSS will be able to go on doing that. User who don’t will have to change to RSS, I’m afraid. Contact me privately for assistance if necessary.

I’ll announce any moratorium as a new post here. You’ll know the new version is live when you get an email about signing up to it (sign up required to keep the commenting restricted to members).

Thanks to both Rex and Matt for helping me think this through.

Keep posting and commenting :-)

Like doonster, I’m finishing up relocating, although not to anywhere near as exotic as the Philippines. I’ll try to catch up on comments over the next week.

An explanatory title to stop you all having to guess :-)

Stills is four in just a few weeks.

Even with the recent kerfuffle, it has been enormous fun. I hope contributors both old and new feel the same. I hope for more fun in the future.

In the near term, though, I’m going to create a bit of a problem by letting my hosting contract expire in the new year. Stills was never meant to be the sub-directory of auspiciousdragon.net that it now is (if you recall, Blogger locked up and I moved it in exasperation one day). It will be an unfortunate side effect of me winding up most of my net presence that Stills will become homeless.

There are options, such as moving to wordpress.com. Each option has advantages and disadvantages that I’d need to spend a little time to explore. We might end up with something a bit less flexible, for example, than the current set up.

My purpose in writing this before doing the research is to find out whether any contributor who has hosted server space might consider taking the site over. I’d happily go on administering (or jointly administering) it. Please contact me privately if you think you might be able to provide Stills with a new home.

(Yes, I continue to call it Stills. No, the lawyer hasn’t yet gone away. Yes, it is all very tedious. Nothing of real concern)