July 2004 – First blog set up – awrush.com (now a legal search consultant website) at bloghosts.com (no longer hosting blogs).

August 2, 2004 – First official post. I mention that our new hosting service is like being a kid in the candy room at Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. The rest of August I’m learning new terms like wiki and RSS and getting addicted to learning it all.

October 2004 – The name is official And He Blogs.

December 2004 – Goodbye Bloghosts. Hello Bluehost.

March 2005 – Very much in the Windows world, I rig up a podcast-catching machine by using a Dell Axim X5 Pocket PC combined with the Doppler software and inspired by this article. (Now, in July of 2009, I discover that Doppler is an RSS reader for the iPhone and it might well be my go-to program).

Late March 2005 – The MediaBlog begins its experiment.

Memorial Day 2005 – My first MoBlog (mobile blog) post, and then my first post about my first MoBlog post.

June 21, 2005 – The And He Blogs WordPress era begins.

January 29, 2006 – ELI Conference in San Diego. Lots of Web 2.0′wy stuff there.

April 2006 – Easy, Free, Videoblogging.

December 2006 – Udell. Microsoft. Bwah???

February 2007 was a good month, including YouTube in MediaWiki. Also, discovered one of the most important thinkers of web 2.0 academia – Michael Wesch.

April 2007 – The Bliki – AKA Play Misty For Me.

May 2007 – Somewhere around here I entered the Twitter era.

September 2007 – Microsoft Live Writer makes blogging easy, but ultimately just creates ugly code for blogs – think Microsoft Word web pages.

June 2008 – Edupunk? Seriously???

July 2008 – TweetDeck. Yeah, it was important!

December 2008 – What’s better than YouTube? YouTube in HD!

March 2009 – Mobile Computing. Demonstrating educational uses of the iPhone.

June 2009 – The New Media presentation of my lifetime, and instant mobile podcasting.

July 2009 – Is technology so ubiquitous that we’re bored with it?

This tale is brought to you by Bluehost, or rather the lack thereof. My account was down yesterday for about 12 hours. I have no illusions that anybody even noticed, but for me it was frustrating because I had a post brewing and I couldn’t write it. Now why couldn’t I write it and post it later? I’m using Windows Live Writer right? Well no because I’m using the Mac side of my MacBook Pro much more lately and there’s no WLW on this side of the grass. I’ll have a post about the Mac vs. PC thing soon I’m sure. (Yes, I know there is a thing called a text editor, but I’m spoiled you know).

Now it may have been a good thing I didn’t post yesterday because it was going to be a rant about how some people are essentially blaming the less well off for the current economic crisis. I’m talking about, among others, that horse’s ass Rick Santelli and Phil “nation of whiners” Gramm. Again, maybe it’s just as well because I can move on now and still get to call Rick Santelli a horse’s ass. Twice!

So just to prove John Lennon’s posit that life is what’s happening when you’re making other plans, I was off doing something completely different than writing a political rant. I was seeing what people were saying about web hosting companies. I was able to listen in on other conversations (and rants) about their web host. Wondering whether the grass was greener, I was seeing that it wasn’t necessarily. How was I listening in on all this? With TweetDeck. If you don’t know what TweetDeck is, it is an Adobe Air application that gives a different view of the Twitter conversation. As I’ve mentioned before, TweetDeck allows you to track multiple conversation with its built in search feature and view it in a separate column that you can track, just like you track what your friends are saying.

As the screenshot above illustrates, I am able to see anyone on Twitter talk about either Bluehost, or another company I am considering, MediaTemple. I have seen both kinds of comments from “I love Bluehost” and “I love MediaTemple” to the more likely “Bluehost/MediaTemple is teh suck” – knowing full well that negative comments will more likely appear on Twitter. Mine did.

What did I learn from the TweetDeck comparison? Ok, so go figure, the grass isn’t always greener. Mentioned also in these conversations was a service called Mosso, that had largely positive reviews. Also, it comes as no surprise that Mosso is more expensive than either Bluehost or MediaTemple. So here’s a summary of what I learned:

• Inexpensive web hosting companies have down-time
• You (for the most part) get what you pay for
• People like to vent/complain/rant
• It’s good to know other people (even those I don’t know) are having similar issues

Thanks TweetDeck, I sure do love you. I think I’ll go tweet that. There.