Moved to Google App Engine

I recently migrated my website from WordPress hosted on Media Temple to Google App Engine. I was happy with Media Temple but the $200/year I was paying for hosting didn't seem worth it given my use—an occasionally updated blog. With App Engine, hosting is free below a daily bandwidth quota. In the unlikely event that the site gets more traffic, I pay a fair rate for the extra bandwidth.

As for WordPress, it wasn't for me. Both the UI and the source code were complicated, and I'm a big fan of simplicity. This site is now using fewer than 200 lines of code, and I understand exactly how it works. Hopefully I won't be spending any more time choosing themes and plugins, fighting spam, or installing near-constant updates. If you're thinking about moving your blog to App Engine, there are two tutorials I recommend: Writing Blogging Software for Google App Engine and Experimenting with Google App Engine (you can see I used a very similar layout, because I liked his so much).

The only rough parts about the migration process were self-inflicted. My Media Temple service expired before I backed up the text from my posts. Although I was a bit indifferent as to whether I should resurrect them, I decided to do so. There were only ~13 posts and I already had the images backed up. I grabbed the text/HTML from various search engine caches and my RSS reader. All of my other content, including videos and comments, was stored via external services (Vimeo and Disqus). The only other thing I messed up was rebooting my RSS feed. If you're subscribed, I'm sorry for spamming you with old posts.