And Now, Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Programming

Virtual Christmas Decorations

I’ve been busy decorating my Mac with a Christmas theme lately. Here’s my current desktop:

Also, to get in the holiday spirit I’ve given a Christmas theme to The Weifang Radish, so if you’re just reading the feed you might want to go to the actual homepage.

Desktop, Christmas Tree, Gift Wrapped Drives

Tags Christmas Decorations

Moved to Beijing

Jinjin, Cheachers and I moved to Beijing on September 1 and have been getting settled in—I bought a three-speed floor fan on clearance from Wal*Mart for 47RMB ($6) and a Haier microwave with grill for 318RMB ($40), and Jinjin snagged some super deals on a bunch of household goods with her native bargaining skills at 金五星, a huge warehouse/market in our neighborhood—which is why I’ve not posted in a while.

I’ve started a new job teaching English at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, or Beihang University for short. There are lots of observations I want to share about Beijing in comparison to a small Chinese city like Weifang, and plenty of pictures I’ll be posting too to my Flickr account, but for the moment just this quick update.

The Weifang Radish is Moving …

… Here! The old URL was http://homepage.mac.com/kevinjamessmith/iblog.

I have managed to save most of the entries and media files from iBlog and the .Mac server. I’m working on porting the comments, but it’s pushing the limits of my tech skills, so no promises I’ll succeed. Also, there are lots of links to items on the .Mac server. I think those are just going to have to be dead links, as I can think of no way of changing them via a script and I’m not about to go through nearly 300 posts and change them manually.

I’ll keep posting to http://homepage.mac.com/kevinjamessmith/iblog until at least the middle of August, so no need to change your bookmark / feed just yet.

I’m moving because my .Mac membership expires at the end of August and to me it’s not worth the $69-$99 it costs to renew it. Furthermore, as blogging software goes, iBlog is stuck back in 2003. iBlog 2 has been in development for ages and in my opinion just doesn’t seem likely to come out ever, though I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

Unfortunately, WordPress.com is blocked in China, and I guess that means it doesn’t make a lot of sense for me to host the Radish here. I like WordPress.com, however, because if I ever want to pay for webhosting and run WordPress myself, it seems it will be simple enough to port my WordPress.com blog over, simpler than from iBlog, at the very least.

Also, for any iBlog bloggers considering switching, Bruce McKenzie has done an excellent write up of the procedure. At the very least, you’ll want to download Agitprop to do the dirty work of exporting your iBlog posts in a WordPress / Moveable Type friendly format.

If you’re wondering what happened to 中文 Unedited, which previously lived here, I’ve killed it. It may be resurrected somewhere else someday, like on a popular Chinese blog site.

Happy Independence Day!

Happy Independence Day!