Changing hosting provider #1

After I purchased an account for this site last weekend, I have been exploring the possibilities and planning how to switch my site to the new server. I prefer to think a little bit before I start copying recklessly.

The thing that took most of my time is making choices, since I have now so many more options than I had before. For example, I have three options to access my e-mail with a web client (NeoMail, horde or SquirrelMail), and three options to analyse the access statistics (AWStats, webalizer, Urchin). Besides making choices, I have been experimenting on setting up a mailing list for the notifications, created a subdomain for my photo gallery, blocked some IP addresses, activated SpamAssasin on my e-mail, ... All these options are comfortably available through cPanel, something I have never seen before, but which I liked immediately.

Of course I started installing Movable Type, this time using a MySQL database to store all the information. This gave me also the opportunity to play a little bit with MySQL. After setting up MT, I configured my three weblogs (Braintags, Braintags Gallery and Braintags Static Content), but did not yet copy the style sheets. I want to use this site conversion to update all my templates and styles. I am thinking about using a three-column layout for my main page, since the current sidebar is too long. Besides that I want to integrate my photo gallery by using a likewise style. So the next week I will be playing HTML-Kit and TopStyle Pro. Once this is done, I will export and import all the date and change the DNS record so you all can see the new site (without pop-up banners!!).