It was Jan 12th, 2004, when I posted the first entry on this blog. The blog engine I built back then has served both my and Jim's blogs very very very well. However, it has really been showing its age. Some design decisions back in 2003 and inexperience with ASP.NET means that our generated pages are not great Web citizens when it comes to caching. Also, there is a monolithic pipeline for managing every incoming request. Not a good thing for folks who are writing a Web-related book 🙂

So, I've started working on a new version of "pblog". The option of moving to a hosted solution crossed my mind but where'd be the fun in that, right? Also, new technologies have emerged since then that make it much easier to build a new engine.

In the process, we are also going to change hosting providers. We are absolutely grateful to the fine folks of the School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle, for hosting our server all this time. I was taking advantage of my status as a "Visiting Researcher", which is about to end, to have a server machine at a corner in their data center. Irrespective of that, however, it's really time to move to a proper hosting provider.

If all goes according to plan, you shouldn't experience any problems at all. There'd even be HTTP 301s ("moved permanently") for all the permalinks that will go out of date. This way the search engines will be informed and the incoming links from the blogosphere will not break. That's if all goes according to plan 🙂

I am also going to move http://savas.parastatidis.name to http://savas.me in order to make it easier for people to remember/type my URI. Both will work though. My personal email and Live ID will remain savas@parastatidis.name. I'll deal with the long email (nightmare to spell over the phone every time I need to give it, especially given my "great" accent 🙂 at a later point.

There is going to be a new look/design for my web site. The test versions are already MUCH faster than the current layout and more standards compliant (I hope). The new layout makes extensive use of CSS (no more tables, woo hoo!) and should render well on all browsers. I am aiming for a beta deployment for next weekend.

Finally, I've set my mind to a name change for this blog and I am open to suggestions! Here are a couple I am considering:

• savas written backwards
• savas in the sky with diamonds

Comment or email me with your suggestion.