I have finally made the switch

Having been a loyal user of Radio Userland, with all of its quirks, for 6 months I have finally made the switch over to blogmedia who host the blogware platform.  I did a trial switch over to typepad a month or so ago, but it did not go too well and I decided to stick with Radio.  But yesterday I ran out of disk space on the Radio Userland server and it went like this …

1. So without any notice in my event log, I see that uploads are failing because I have used up my 40MB allocation.  40MB seemed a huge amount for text blog entries, but apparently radio has lots of different renderings and archives it maintains.
2. I thought this should be easy – tidy up – but this has proven almost impossible to do cost effectively
3. So I thought I will get more disk space, but it’s incredibly expensive.  For the same price as I pay for 80MB of space on Radio I can get 1 GB on blogmedia.

I really was not keen to change, because of the effort involved but I was so annoyed last night with trying to free up disk space, (still not resolved 18 hours later!), that I did it.

I made a list of the features I missed in Radio:

1. I wanted to be able to create secure areas, multiple authors etc
2. I wanted more control over the layout
3. I wanted more disk space, I have 1GB now, I used to have 40MB
4. I wanted FTP publishing
5. I wanted better search
6. I wanted better usage statistics
7. I wanted an easier to remember url
8. Radio performance was dreadful
9. There were too many bugs in the client, and I disliked the delay between publishing locally and getting the file published on the web.  So I wanted to go web based.  I still wanted the option to use a local client, so blogger API support was needed.

In the end I chose blogware for the software, and blogmedia for hosting.  I didn’t have much time to make the decision, but I have not regretted it so far!  I has taken about 3 hours to move the data over!