For the longest time I’ve been using Drupal at our main family site, Crooks.net. That installation of Drupal is getting a bit creaky, being two full versions behind. Crooks.net doesn’t really get many visitors and is primarily used simply to host my personal blog. (It handles one other important feature, providing a secure location for some family information. I’ll cover that in a different blog post when I get Crooks.net updated.)

Over the years I’ve gone through several different iterations of figuring out how I wanted to do my meager blogging. For the most part that meant posting the occasional picture. My tool of choice for a while has been Posterous, a blogging site that made it really easy to email in a blog post that would then get routed to any other social sites (Twitter, Facebook) plus my blog at crooks.net and nicely format everything.

I decided recently that it was silly to use Posterous. I have long paid for my own web server with Dreamhost and I can install darn near anything I want on it. So I’ve now gone through the motions and I believe I can pretty easily post directly on this blog and have things sent to Twitter or Facebook if I so choose. Easy is the key. I wanted this to be at least close to as easy as it was to use Posterous. The good part now is that I own everything: the shorturl service, the blog software, where pictures are stored, etc. Now I’m only in danger if Dreamhost goes out of business and I haven’t made a recent backup.

This is all brand new so I’m sure I’ll be tweaking things over the next month or two. And I still have to go put a replacement in for Crooks.net also. This seems to be a good start.