And we have safely arrived in the 21st century.

It wasn’t the smoothest of transitions, but it went a whole lot better than it could have. I’ve moved the venerable Silicon Underground, with its nearly 1,800 posts spanning a little over a decade, to WordPress 3.0.1.

This blog’s been pretty stale for a long time. Some of that is due to the software. Some of it’s my fault. Blogging software has really advanced a lot in the last few years, and the software I’ve been using since 2004 was a bit behind the curve even then. In its defense, in 2004 nothing could do everything I wanted, and the system I chose was one of the few that required login and authentication, which I desperately needed in order to stop spam. But then registration broke, and I didn’t fix it, which meant only longtime readers could comment.

For commenting, we’re going back to username and e-mail address with optional URL, and with some spam analysis tools hopefully filtering out the spam. Users are moderated until their second comment, which will help take care of the trolls. Comments containing multiple hyperlinks automatically go to moderation. And comments will be closed after some period of time, probably 14 days. Discussions usually go downhill as time goes on.

Will I post more now that it’s easier? Probably.

Modern blogs can interact with one another; mine was always an island. Now I can trackback and pingback like everyone else, which will probably prove useful.

I’m sure I’ll be making changes for a while, but this is a big improvement.

I’d like to thank Steve D. and Rich P. (you know who you are) for their help with the migration. It only took me what, three years to go through with it? Four? And then it ended up taking about two hours of real work, if that, spread out over the course of a couple of weeks.