Hooray! Everything2 is back, now hosted at UMich on a much better internet connection with some shiny new hardware. That means, more speed! Less downtime! And thus, more time wasted by me and thousands of others who peruse through E2 whenever we have free time. It also means my “Node For the Ages” sidebar has been updated, with an entry on a topic that I feel strongly about.

I’m hoping in the next week or so to move my blog away from b2 to something new, probably pMachine but possibly WordPress. I’m looking for something with some more features, a little prettier, and somewhat extensible. pMachine lets you have sidebar blocks, and if they can include PHP code, then that’s all I really need, I gather. And it’s XHTML 1.0 compliant, which is nice, including converting characters into proper HTML entities for things like curly quotes and em-dashes. That messes up copy and paste sometimes, but it might be worth it. The trick will be to figure out how to import all of my old entries to take advantage of the new formatting. And perhaps to replace all of the line break tags with proper paragraph tags…but that might be harder.