Downtown Los Angeles, from the Hollywood Hills

Went back to the photo I used to create my SoCal Mom banner.

Welcome to the new home of SoCal Mom!

I did not plan to put up a new site today. But a funny thing happened when I fired up my email this morning: I saw my annual renewal notice from Network Solutions and balked.

I’ve had this domain with NS since — well, almost since they were the only registrar in town. There are less expensive ones I could use  – and in fact, I do with other sites.

But when I began this blog (in 2003!), I was feeling burnt out on all things webmaster-y, like FTP’ing and installing scripts and playing with HTML. Typepad made it easy to put my blog up while offering me other goodies I could not get for free — and NS was the only registrar that seemed to play nicely with their “domain mapping” feature. And if you have ever tried moving a domain from one registrar to another, you will understand why I stay with them.

But I don’t need the extra features. At least, I wouldn’t if I were self-hosted.

Typepad has not kept up with the times. I really am tired of being unable to add features to SoCal Mom that are easy to add on my WordPress sites, and have been threatening to make a move for a couple of years.

So when I got the renewal notice today, I only renewed the domain part of it — and ordered a cheap hosting package from another provider.

And so, voila! Here I am.

It took me over a month earlier this year to transfer the original MOMocrats site from its berth on Typepad. I don’t know if I can handle doing the same with SoCal Mom. So the original site will remain there until I find the time (and the courage!) to make the move. And here is where you’ll find my new stuff.

If you’ve been accessing this site by typing in the domain, there’s no change. As for RSS – I still haven’t done anything since the demise of Feedburner. I guess that’s my next step.