The good news is that no important data is lost. The failure has been in progress for about two weeks, so I’ve had ample warning (and frustration).

The bad news is that my blogging schedule will continue to be disrupted for several more days at least.

I am writing this post on the WordPress app for iPhone. I’d been looking for a chance to try it out, but this is an unfortunate way to do it (much better to have been in some exotic locale uploading a photo of a rarity…).

While I’m dealing with this, head on over to 10,000 Birds, where Mike has posted Renato’s video of a hummingbird we saw in Ecuador. It’s awesome because the gorgeous little bird is bathing in puddle on a large leaf, but we are also requesting ID help. Which hummer is it?

OK, I guess now I have no excuses to put off that housework I’ve been avoiding….

Update: So far so good. I found a plugin called Media Tags to handle tagging. Not as ideal as having native support, but it works for now.

Also, if you want your picture to appear in the comments, all you have to do is create an avatar linked to your email address with Gravatar. Otherwise, you get a pretty geometric design (an improvement, I hope, over the bland gray figure).

Related posts:

1. Email subscriptions, labels, and exploring
2. Search and Serendipity has moved!

This, however, is my last week as a Texas resident for the foreseeable future.

I have accepted a position with Audubon and will be moving to Vicksburg, Mississippi, in just a few days.

I still have stories to tell from my time in Africa, and of course I want to tell you more about this exciting new phase of my life, but most of that will have to wait until I get settled in Mississippi.

I should be packing, but instead I’m goofing off in clothes I brought back from Ethiopia! And blogging! OK, back to packing….

If you have questions about this transition, leave them in the comments, and I’ll address them in a future post.

In other news, the slightly belated fourth anniversary edition of I and the Bird is up at 10,000 Birds: I and the Bird #106: Four Years Young! Corey guides us on a look back at bird blogging and general world events over the last four years.

Related posts:

1. Trying something new with images

I had heard of blogs during college but didn’t really know anybody who had one. I had been trying to think of a reason that anyone would want to write a blog when, one March day, I saw a small gang of Brown-headed Cowbirds singing and displaying in the spring sunshine, and something clicked. I could write a blog about birds! A few days later, I signed up for Blogger and got started.

I suppose that in blog years, Search and Serendipity is middle-aged.

When I started blogging, Google Maps was less than six weeks old, and it did not have satellite view. When I started blogging, nobody I knew had ever heard of Facebook. When I started blogging, Twitter was still an entire year away from its debut, and even farther from fame.

According to an estimate by John Trapp of Birds Etcetera, there may have been fewer than 35 birding blogs based in North America when I started Search and Serendipity four years ago. (See the estimate, plus a list of bird blog pioneers who started in 2002 and 2003 here.)

Today, there are hundreds. Instead of blogrolls that could once contain most known birding blogs, we now have services like Nature Blog Network that let us explore seemingly endless blogs from all over the world. Wow.

Identifying the oldest bird blog probably isn’t possible — definitions would derail the discussion if nothing else — but Janet Egan of The Plover Warden Diaries has dated entries going back to 1996 on her old site, and the Internet Archive confirms that some of those pages date back to at least January 1998. That was about the same time that the word “blog” was coined, and before any blog publishing services became available.

For a look at who else was around in 2005, have a look at I and the Bird #1! (That was in July 2005. I found IATB and started participating in September, I think.)

Well, enough nostalgia. My life has changed hugely over the last four years, but on this fourth anniversary of Search and Serendipity’s debut, I find myself enjoying a Texas spring once again.

I haven’t been able to be as prolific as some, nor as influential as others, but I’m really enjoying writing this blog and getting to know so many of you through it.

Bird on!

Related posts:

1. Solstice means beginnings
2. We interrupt this program…
3. Personal news: Moving and changing jobs

If you have any feedback, let me know. One thing I’ve done is to double the size of images in new posts (example). Let me know if this eats your screen alive or clogs your intertubes. Or if you think it’s awesome.

OK, can anybody tell I’ve been staring at a screen for far too long?

Birds today: Harris’s Sparrow and Field Sparrow at the library but no Wild Turkey (!?) that a friend reported yesterday. Monk Parakeets and White-winged Doves around the apartment.

Related posts:

1. Winter residents arrive

• Greater Scaup
• Virginia Rail
• King Rail
• Groove-billed Ani
• Sprague’s Pipit

Wish us luck!

Related posts:

1. Gulf Coast report and Long-tailed Duck
2. More Gulf Coast photos
3. Gulf Coast Day 1: Spectacle and color

1. The categories display has gotten messed up, partly because of the import and partly (it seems) because of the way the new version of WordPress handles parent categories.
2. My blogroll is gone and will have to be rebuilt.
3. Static pages are MIA but can hopefully be recovered … ?
4. A few older images in posts may be broken temporarily.
5. A few more trivial problems hardly worth mentioning.
6. Do you see anything else that seems different, odd, or broken? At the moment, there should not be any wholescale changes in layout, and everything should still be working. If not, please let me know.

Related posts:

1. Search and Serendipity has moved!
2. Maintenance downtime today!
3. Trying something new with images

Related posts:

1. Maintenance mostly completed
2. “Pardon our progress”
3. Today is my (blog’s) birthday

Fruticose lichen mingles with moss and a tiny forb at Arrowhead State Park in Oklahoma.

Related posts:

1. Children of the rocks
2. Long-lost South Florida photos
3. More Gulf Coast photos

Note: My feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/thewanderling/) remains the same, so you do not need to alter your subscriptions.

I’ve also made the switch to WordPress, which pretty much rules. The learning curve has been a bit steep, but I think we’re going to make it.

My main concern was getting all the old posts and comments transferred over; the WordPress importer doesn’t work with the new Blogger. But thankfully, Ady Romantika has developed a script to import from the new Blogger to WordPress. But — augh! — it relies on allow_url_fopen, which DreamHost has disabled for security reasons. [Update 01/10/07: Ady's script has been modified to work even when fopen is disabled.] I thought I was sunk, but my talented friend Shroud (who writes a newspaper column and can be a bit eccentric) managed to modify the script so it uses cURL … and (after many tries) voila! All posts and comments appear to have come across almost perfectly.

There are still a lot of rough edges and missing features, but I’ll work on them as we go along. My Blogger labels didn’t transfer over as categories, so I’ll have to redo all of those at some point. Please let me know if you have any trouble, if anything looks strange, or if something is missing that you’d like to see.

Related posts:

1. Email subscriptions, labels, and exploring
2. Trying something new with images
3. Maintenance mostly completed