With the beginning of the New Year comes the beginning of many other challenges and opportunities, and I will be sharing these throughout the year as plans become finalized. However my first big change is the creation of a new website, and the start of the end of several old ones.

As some of my longtime followers know, I setup my first personal webpage twenty years ago when I was just a first year student at the University of Victoria. In keeping with the technology of the time, it was a rather basic homepage by modern standards. In 1998 I migrated the entire website to another service provider in anticipation of graduation. What I could not anticipate then was that the simple website I setup up to share my Grandiloquent Dictionary project with friends and classmates would quickly explode in popularity, spawning countless spin-off projects and over two million hits from every country in the world!

After getting through a very rough decade as a caregiver through the 2000s, I made the decision in 2009 to completely rebuild my webpages, and to separate my growing collection of pages into three separate websites - a professional website for my physics and mathematics research, a public website to cover my work in programming, robotics, and various other projects, and after a 2011 security breach I made a private website of family history and information meant for a more limited audience.

In just under six years, my public website has drawn over 30,000 visitors and has lead to meeting many amazing people and has created some wonderful experiences for me. 

Unfortunately it has not all been so enjoyable. In 2011 I discovered a massive security break in, in which an individual rewrote large sections of my website for their own nefarious purposes. Soon after I discovered my mother's e-mail account had been hijacked, and in the four years since then I have had constant attacks on my website security, my e-mail, denial-of-service attacks, as well as various forms of identity theft. And unfortunately the webhost that I have been using simply does not allow enough customization of the security settings and website design to fend off the constant attacks.

For that reason I have decided to rebuild and clean up my websites once more. I will be migrating to a new webhost in the next few days, and will slowly be migrating all of my old content to the new website. 

This new provider is a little bit more expensive, but in return they offer a much better hosting package including improved security and better access to modern features such as HTML5 and newer versions of PHP and Ruby. Unfortunately this move will probably cost me a lot of existing links and search engine rankings, but that is a necessary price I must pay for the improvements. I am eagerly looking forward to working with them to build a much better website moving forward. 

For the next few months I will be gradually migrating everything to the new site. However I will continue to update my old websites as well, at least until they are no longer in use by my followers and readers.

And as my first official link to my new website, it can be found at drchrisbird.net. Please update your links and bookmarks, and then come over for a visit!