The Mountain and the Tree

Turns out Google have decided to "change the way they support FTP publishing", which is to say they're going to stop supporting it. This means I have to migrate Eithin to a new platform - what they're suggesting is to use either a Blogger/Blogspot hosted one, or buy a special domain name for that-and-only-that.

Neither of which work for me; I have a perfectly good web host, with other things on it, and I actually quite like having code there. Since the web host provider gives me Fantastico for software, I can have Drupal, Mambo, Joomla, or Wordpress without any problems. I already have one Wordpress instance, for CIRW, so I'm not sure whether to go with that again (it's certainly better and easier to use than Blogger) or to migrate the currently-via-Blogger blog & a few standalone pages into a proper CMS which will then give me more of a platform to expand. Wordpress would be very well specified for what I'm currently doing, but I'm hesitant to either run two installations of it or deal with the hackery necessary to run two blogs from one.

I've never used any of the other three before, but I'm pretty good at this learning curve business. Obviously, I'm going to do some poking around, but since I have a fair few web geeks amongst my readers - do any of you have any opinions on these options, or suggestions of other things I haven't considered?

I'm looking for an IM client for Windows - specifically for use with MSN. I don't use other services as it stands.

The reason I'd like a new one is because I often find the new-message notifications on the official MSN client really stressful and intrusive.

So if any of you know of a client that will notify me visually but without any flashing or flickering, and preferably in a nice nonstressful colour, I'd be very interested to hear about it.

My current hosting package is due to run out in a while, and I've been thinking about upgrading elsewhere. Currently I'm using 123-reg's simplest hosting package, but that doesn't let me run anything complex, and I have for quite some time now been wanting to host my own wiki. (I'd prefer Mediawiki, but other engines are entirely possible, and yes, I do want to have it on a server, or at least "server", I control if at all possible.)

Something that will talk directly to gmail, instead of my needing to forward mail through a third account, would also be nice.

Do any of you have recommendations to make? Or indeed disrecommendations?

Finally, I have connectivity again. On Monday afternoon, my laptop power cable finally gave up the ghost - it had been getting progressively more and more picky about actually providing any power, up to the point where I had to spend five minutes jiggling it about and physically forcing it in to find a position where it would work. Every time. So I opened the DC jack up to look inside, and it turned out that one of the wires had physically snapped. No wonder it was getting warm...
( solution )
( reading )

Other than that, my life has been entirely dull whilst offline. What've I missed? What should I be doing any time soon?

Many of my readers are geeks themselves, and I'm quite prepared to admit that I am too. The ramifications of the ways geeks and non-geeks communicate with each other rather interest me, so I trust you'll forgive my rambling on the subject for awhile.

( long )