pixels on vermont

Happy New Year from pov and my family. That’s the photo we used for our holiday/new year cards. I love it.

Also, please check out the new version of the site and vote here on whether or not you like it.

Here’s the link to the new pixels on vermont: http://www.uvm.edu/~mjacobso/

Pros:

• Way more flexibility in customizing the design. The only real limitor is my lack of web design skillz. Still, I’m pretty happy with how it looks right now. The flexibility comes from using the self-hosted version of wordpress instead of the simplified wordpress hosted version of wordpress.
• Looks less like a blog– no sidebar puts focus on the content. Dan was pushing for that.
• Being hosted by uvm is pretty cool, I think. Feels more legitimate.
• Now able to embed videos at the full width of the post. It’s kind of silly that’s not possible here, but it’s not.
• Being self hosted means all the category/tag links are relevant to pov and don’t link back to all other wordpress blogs. It’s more independent. Compare this to this. The second could be useful to people who want to browse the posts on this page, but being wordpress hosted means it’ll give the first link (see the bottom of this post) which is really useless for pov–but I can’t complain because they are hosting my site for me.
• When my claim over the domain pixelsonvermont.com expires in mid-August 2009, I won’t need to pay another 10 dollars to renew it for a year. Until then, if we do make the switch, the domain can simply redirect to there so people don’t get confused.

Cons:

• For the time being, it seems like the address will have to be /~mjacobso, not /pov like I hoped for. Read this for UVM’s policy for a url change. I think I have a case. It’s not really a personal page, it’s a communal thing. I might need to find someone to sponsor the name change.
• Because I’m somewhat obsessive compulsive about organizing things, it bothers me that the files are still hosted here and being displayed there, so I’ll probably undertake transferring all of them over there… Which will just be a bummering time consumer for me, but no big deal for you.
• But the transition might confuse some people. Another con.
• When I graduate in a year and a half, it might be complicated handing the reigns down to someone else if it’s hosted at /~mjacobso. I’m sure that can be worked out, but it’s a bit of a worry.
• It’s very, very pink.

Clearly I’m leaning toward making the switch, but what do you think? Please vote in the poll and/or comment. Any thoughts much appreciated.