April 03, 2005 at 8:51 pm

Well, I'm leaving Diaryland. This is not the end of AEV, however; as I've liberated it. I'm moving to a Movable Type blog at my new webspace at http://www.freepgs.com/aev/. So, what's the total cost for this move? $6 and the time needed to setup and learn Movable Type. I downloaded MT at midnight last night, and I have it running and my Diaryland template already converted and in place.

For $20 a year, I can even get a domain name for it.

So, why am I doing this? As it is my own setup of MT and webspace, I am in control. I can post when I want to, and not get an error message about the sever being swamped. Comments are free. I don't understand how The Open Diary, Livejournal, and Deadjournal can have free comments, yet DL wants to charge you.

Not to bash DL, it's been somewhat good to me. But I'm going to a better place.

My one issue with moving to MT was the fear AEV would end up looking like a MT blog. They're quite easy to spot. Luckily, the template system is powerful, yet not hard. My DL template required only minute changes to transfer, mostly chaning DL variables to MT variables.

Oh, and another good reason for leaving Diaryland? It doesn't produce HTML 4.01 Strict, no matter what I put into it. My template had all ampersands as character entity references, but DL converted them to the ASCII symbol, which kept my diary entries from validating. For someone adamant about web standards, that's a big problem.

So, goodbye Diaryland. We almost had two years together.