Those of you who are kind enough to have subscribed to this humble blog may have noticed a few new posts suddenly appear. That’s because I have officially merged MacManX.com with my very short-lived MacManX on Music blog. After all, there really was no reason to divide my efforts like that. But, the merger wasn’t the big change.

MacManX.com is no longer a self-hosted WordPress blog under A Small Orange. It is now officially a WordPress.com blog. Don’t get me wrong, A Small Orange has been a terrific host, and I still have quite a few sites hosted with them. The decision to move was made for a few reasons:

1. Having my blog on WordPress.com shows that I have entrusted my own blog to the very system that I support.
2. Blogging on WordPress.com allows me to get a better feel for what I’m supporting every day.
3. I was growing tired of updating plugins and finding replacements for abandoned plugins. WordPress.com has all the features that I need, and they are maintained on a constant basis.
4. A Small Orange was a wonderful host, and the server that I was on was no exception, but it pales in comparison to WordPress.com’s multiple datacenters, could-powered system, multi-layer caching, and the fact that I know everyone here by name.

The only notable loss was my custom theme, courtesy of fellow Automattician Joen, but I’ll be leveraging our available themes and Custom CSS to make something truly unique over the next few months. If you’re curious, feel free to browse the gallery of past MacManX.com themes.

Thanks to the wonders of domain mapping, everything should be exactly as it was, which means you won’t need to resubscribe, but I do have a handy email subscription button in the sidebar now if that’s your thing.

So, how did I move? Well, it was a lot easier than I thought. The hardest part was editing all of my video posts to use our quick embed technique for YouTube and Vimeo, rather than their native embed codes, before exporting. After that, I simply exported MacManX.com, imported it to the former MacManX on Music, changed the name, deleted a few obsolete pages, and mapped my domain. Domain changes can take up to 72 hours (though usually much less) to propagate to your ISP, but thanks to OpenDNS, I was up in a matter of minutes.

I’ve been through big moves like this before, so I’m sure there may be a few broken links hiding in the corners. If you find any, please let me know!

P.S. With this blog post, I have now officially entered the Post a Day challenge. Let’s see how long that lasts. 😉