Good news, everyone: How Now Brownpau has returned.

It’s been a while. I had succumbed to a double-fault state of distractibility and near-burnout, collecting ideas and content but settling for posting bits and pieces on Twitter and Tumblr while my personal web space languished and my ambitions for longer-form posts withered on the vine. Finally I decided to cure my scatter-brained sense of futility with a sudden and willful flurry of activity, starting with an upgrade of Movable Type from 4.3x to 5.

That went badly, as the upgrade wiped out all my painstakingly crafted PHP-based template work, killed a bunch of page-based customization hacks, and presented me with little option other than to start from scratch once again. At that point I decided to finally go with the advice others (especially Russell) had given me, and make the switch to WordPress. (Sorry, MT, you served me well for many years, but the times I yelled “NO!” at the CMS finally outnumbered the times I yelled “YES!” and so it was time for a change.)

(Around the same time, AxisHost began offering VPS, and I jumped at the chance to finally have a server-like hosting environment on one of the best hosts in the business.)

So HNBP now runs on WordPress and a VPS. To meet a self-imposed, travel-related deadline, I’ve had to settle for minimal customization and a design from the WordPress theme library (veryplaintxt). Migration is still not done, and many things are still missing, broken, or stuck in default mode. A FriendFeed-based aggregated lifestream continues in the sidebar, and that is where most of the freshness will be for now. (I’m open to suggestions for a plugin that will take FriendFeed or other social media content and integrate it into the WordPress loop without actually importing new content as posts in the WP database.)

Summer is here. And now, so am I.

Preserving “Hello world” post here for posterity:

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!