Some changes in my websites lately:

I've moved from Go Daddy to Hover for DNS and domain registry. (A decision long overdue but made because of the company's support for SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act.) It wasn't a tough process but it was rather annoying and time-consuming thanks to the little road-blocks Go Daddy put up in the way. (Step-by-step: 1. Unlock the domains at GoDaddy. 2. Initiate the transfer at Hover. 3. Add the authentication code from GoDaddy (you can request this via email). 4. Update the DNS information on Hover once the transfer goes through -- this took almost a full week.) Hover is very helpful and will also walk you through the process over the phone.

I've moved from Wordpress to a CMS of Kin's design. It's part of a larger effort to make smarter use of the data that underlies our work -- me, writing/talking, and him, writing/talking/hacking.

But now I'm starting to hack too. I've been talking about it for a long time, and I've tried various approaches (online classes, books, etc) -- but now I have a real project: my own websites.

I've heard lots of people say that building a website isn't really programming. And no doubt, most of what I'm doing is simply furthering my HTML and CSS skills -- these are mark-up languages and not programming languages. I have spent a long time working with the HTML in specific blog posts, but now I'm having to handle the design of the entire site -- footers, headers, right columns, and so on. The new system (and I should add here, the extremely patient boyfriend) is enabling me to tinker with PHP and JavaScript too.

Photo credit:  Flickr user Matt Mets