Update 11 July 2010: The move was a lot more painless than I had anticipated, and is already done. If you’re reading this, then your DNS has updated and you are accessing the new server. Hooray! See below about user accounts if you missed the original announcement.

Sometime later this month, Nerdland will be moving. The content and URL of the site won’t change; only the hosting provider will. The new host will be a Rackspace Cloud Server. This probably doesn’t affect you directly unless you are one of the people to whom I gave a Nerdland “user account” with web hosting space and e-mail over the past eleven years. If you are one of those people, please read the next few paragraphs.

As part of the move, I’m going to take the opportunity to clean out a lot of cruft that’s been building up on the Nerdland server over the past half-decade since the last hosting change. Most of the user accounts that I provided for friends and relatives aren’t being used anymore, and aren’t linked from anywhere on the Internet, so there’s no reason to migrate them. Rest assured, nothing will be permanently deleted. I’m an incorrigible data pack-rat, so I’m of course going to archive and back-up everything, including what I don’t move to the new server. If you had data stored on Nerdland, you can always contact me in the future, and I will gladly send you a copy of your old files and unretrieved e-mail, or restore your data and account to the server.

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Two new items have been added to Nerdland today.

First, on the left hand side you will see a link to a new section entitled “Unstumping the Internet“. The purpose of this section, as its index page explains, is

This set of pages is for cataloging relatively brief answers to questions that I had to figure out myself after being unable to find the answer on the Internet. […] When I encounter a question that I cannot find an answer for on the Internet, and especially if in my searching I notice that several other people have asked this question with no satisfactory answer, I will post the answer here when I discover it. The hope is that next time someone searches the Internet for this question, they will find my answer.

So this section is not something that I expect anyone to read frequently, or even at all. I’m not going to be posting to the front page when I add new articles there, as the whole point of this section is to not clutter the front page with items of limited interest and minimal depth. Instead, I hope that these pages will visited primarily as the results of search engine queries.

Secondly, on the right hand side, there is a new section of links entitled “Interesting Items Elsewhere”. This is a listing of the last few items from other weblogs (or other sorts of feeds) that I have found most interesting. This is in fact tied to my Google Reader account, and displays items that I have “shared”, so these may not always be completely serious or computer-related. You can click on the “more” link at the bottom to see everything I’ve shared, as opposed to just the few most recent items.

Nerdland has been “down for reconstruction” for almost a year now, since July 11, 2008, and had been almost completely stagnant for at least two years before that. Today, it has re-opened with a new purpose. To quote the About page:

Nerdland is my personal website. It has been many things since it was first brought online in 1999. Historically, it has been an my experimentation ground for web development. These days, it is a place where I put records of my thoughts and activities, mostly related to my dual career-hobby of computer programming, and my interests in theoretical computer science. Nerdland is not strictly a weblog. Shorter comments and time-relevant materials are posted in weblog format, but Nerdland also serves as a collection of standalone articles, which are permanently accessible through the links on the left.

The primary difference between this and previous incarnations of Nerdland is that I will be creating significant new content myself, rather than simply providing a framework for contributions and hoping for others to do so. Also, the content will generally have an overarching theme, albeit a theme that is wholly defined as “my personal interests”.

The new Nerdland is powered by the WordPress content management system. The design of the site is based on the design and the color scheme of the previous incarnation of Nerdland, but with a cleaner, more minimalist feel. I will probably be tweaking the design frequently over the next few weeks, but the site should remain functional throughout.

All pages and posts on Nerdland, with the exception of the About page and pages that are only indexes to other pages, allow comments. I encourage contributions and remarks from any and all readers. Comments will be moderated for spam and blatant offensiveness, but not much else.

Friends of mine who had “user” pages on the old Nerdland continue to have them under the same URLs as before, although from now on accesses to the user pages will be re-directed to the users.nerdland.net subdomain.