I’ve owned DaveFancher.com for as long as I can remember but I’ve been neglecting it for the past few years.  I’ve neglected it so much that I’ve actually been paying a Web host for e-mail.  That came to an abrupt end tonight.

When I started the site I rolled my own blog and for the most part, it met my needs.  I had a rudimentary rich text editor, I had attachments, I had commenting, I think I even had an RSS feed.  I ultimately got to a point where I wanted to allow drafts, versioning, trackbacks (not that they’d ever be used!), and even ping sites like Technorati but I didn’t have the desire to build any of it.  I just wanted to write.  By the time I reached this point blogging software was coming of age so I started seeking other solutions.

For a while I used Blogger (Blogspot at the time) but I never really liked it although I couldn’t really explain why.  After a long but unproductive run with Blogger/Blogspot I went hunting again.  I checked a few of my friends’ blogs and many of them were using WordPress so I decided to check it out and was hooked almost immediately.

One of the first things I looked into with WordPress was how to self-host.  After all, I was paying for it, right?  Unfortunately it required MySQL which my host didn’t support.  I was kind of disappointed but looked at the hosted option anyway.  WordPress made migrating from Blogger really easy and was so feature-rich I knew it was what I was looking for.  DaveFancher.com would continue to appear abandoned but I wasn’t about to give up my e-mail address.

Fast forward to this evening.  I took the plunge.  I purchased the domain add-on for my WordPress blog, updated the name servers with my registrar, and waited… Amazingly it only took about an hour for the changes to take effect.  But what about e-mail?

As I mentioned, the only reason I’ve really been hanging on to the host was e-mail but the increase in spam over the past few months was becoming an annoyance and was a huge influence on my decision.  Luckily Google offers a free version of Google Apps that makes GMail available to custom domains.  WordPress’s recent addition of DNS editing made it simple to allow Google Apps to manage e-mail.  All I had to do was enter the verification code from Google Apps to let WordPress generate some entries and manually add a few extra CNAME entries to simplify some access.

In the few months since I switched to WordPress I’ve been posting with more frequency than ever before.  Tonight’s changes should give me even more motivation to keep it up.  Now, just a few hours after starting the process DaveFancher.com has a new lease on life thanks to WordPress and Google.