Housekeeping: This and that...

It's been a while since I did a housekeeping post, and for some reason today seemed like a good time to do so.

First, a couple of personal updates.

On a serious note, I just wanted to send my condolences out to those affected by the University of Michigan Survival Flight plane crash. The tragedy hit a little closer to home here at TWFE, as someone close to me lost a good friend in the accident. They are going through a very difficult time, as you might expect.

When tragedy like this strikes, it can be difficult to put your feelings into meaningful words. All I can say is that those brave Survival Flight team members, who do a vital, important, and thankless job, are in our thoughts.

You all probably remember back in February when my housing situation became quite unsettled, to put it mildly. Well, 3+ months have now passed, and everything is cool.

I really like my new place (Soon to be totally remodeled as well), I'm getting to see some very old friends again (It's been fun attempting to explain what TWFE is all about to my computer illiterate buddies), I get to revel in my privacy (I miss my nieces and nephew, but not all the attending drama), and it's allowing me to spend more time on TWFE, if you go by my posting 8 times from Friday afternoon to Sunday night. In other words, all is quite well, knock on wood.

Let me give a quick shout out to Sprint and their ambassador program. I'm into my 2nd month of enjoying the use of Sprint's Samsung M610 phone. I'm far from being cool and with it, as those youngsters might say (I also wear an onion on my belt...Those big yellow ones), but at least my slim jet black cell phone gets their attention.

Moving on to even more trivial matters, like TWFE itself, I'm asking for your opinions and suggestions.

Now that TWFE is a year and a half old, I think the time has come for me to make a few changes, maybe big changes, in the blog.

Changes I have been contemplating include...

1. Getting my own (shorter) domain. This is priority one.
2. Check into other blogging platforms, as I'm beginning to feel hamstrung by Blogger's limitations.
3. Explore hosting options, and find out if that is even worth doing.
4. Making the blog much less generic looking, and have it closer reflect my own sensibilities, thus the reasoning for thoughts for 1 thru 3.
5. Doing all this on a relatively small budget.

I know that many of you have gone through the same thing with your own blogs. So I'm asking for suggestions/recommendations as to what worked best for you, as to hosts, domain registrars, and the like. I'm also curious as to what issues you might have experienced. Last but not least, for those who have experienced working with other blog programs (I've only used Blogger), is moving to Wordpress, or another platform, worth the hassle?

Please feel free to leave comments, or email me directly. (My email address is on the sidebar, if you haven't noticed) It would be very much appreciated!

As always, thanks for reading!