I don’t have all the lights on yet, but you can find me at my new WordPress blog. In a few weeks, this site will automatically redirect over there, but why wait?

A few people were surprised last week when the part of my blog at discuss.jarretthousenorth.com went offline. Well, me too! I had a lot of concert commitments at the end of last week and didn't notice over the weekend when the site went down, nor when my site was replaced with a default Weblogger.com page. But obviously it’s back now.

So here’s what happened: the Manila server that powers my dynamic site (the part where I actually create the content and that serves my RSS feed) suffered a hardware failure. Fortunately, my blog host, the redoubtable Mr. Erin Clerico at Weblogger, had a full backup; it took the better part of the day to bring the backup online on a secondary Manila server, and then my blog took a little longer because of its size (hey, seven years of blog content isn’t a trivial amount of data).

The good news is that after this event, Erin is even more motivated than before to move his Manila sites to a platform that’s more stable and that is being actively maintained. So he’s officially announced his migration service for taking Manila to Wordpress. At the end of the process I’ll have all my blog content (except, unfortunately, the old comments; but those haven’t been accessible for two years now anyway) in a new, modern container that includes far more support for management and spam elimination. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Or, as I told Greg yesterday: I for one welcome our new open-source blogging solution overlords!

I read with some interest that Dave Winer is experimenting with the comment service from Disqus on Scripting News. I turned comments completely off on my site one year ago today and really miss the interactivity. So I signed up for Disqus to see what I could get.

Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to make Disqus work with Manila. I use a hosted Manila site, so I can’t resort to back-end code to make the integration work, and there are two critical pieces that are missing for me to be able to implement Disqus:

1. A unique page for each post. This is obviously not Disqus’s fault, but the version of Manila that I use has one page per day, not per post. So it’s not clear where the comment form should go.
2. A way to modify the permalink URL. The generic Disqus instructions say to publish a version of the permalink URL followed by #disqus_thread. Unfortunately, I don’t appear to have access to a Manila macro that will do this—I get the permalink as a fully formed link.

So it looks like, unless the Disqus people come up with something, I have yet another reason to accelerate my move to another blog platform.

Except...hmmm, now I have an idea about how I might pull it off. Let’s see if I can make it work.

I was contacted today by Schmap, an online travel guide, to use one of my photos of downtown Portland (the sand castle contest photo) in their guide. They found me on Flickr and actually had the courtesy to ask about the photo before they reused it—it’s a Creative Commons-licensed photo. Rather novel, really—I’ve only been asked about one other of my photos, though I have no way to know if any of the others have been reused.