There’s a little pullout on the banks of the Fraser River, just west of where Nordel Way runs into River Road in Delta. It’s ugly and unkempt, but offers quite a picturesque view of the Alex Fraser Bridge looking east, and a glimpse of Annasis Island to the north and west.

It can all be quite pretty looking out over the river. The mood changes with the weather, the time of day and the season, and there is usually some form of traffic working the river. The variety of boats is amazing. Everything from big, boxy car freighters to small aluminum fishing boats work the river all year.

It’s a shame we don’t make more public use of the south shores of the Fraser. There’s lots of industry, but public access is limited. Matter of fact, I don’t think there is much access at all between Brownsville Park in north Surrey and this pullout spot in Delta.

Sad.

Latimer Lake is a very small lake in South Surrey, BC. It’s located just east of a new industrial park called Campbell Heights. A friend and I were over there a couple of weeks ago, and noticed that while it was still beautiful, there was substantially less water in the lake than we remembered.

I think we’ll watch this one. It would be a shame to lose a little oasis like this.

The area had an environmental study done on it before the development started. You’d think they would have had a plan for maintaining the lake, either from natural runoff, or through drainage via settling ponds in the development itself.

Guess we’ll see. Perhaps it will fill again with the winter rains.

I first started blogging with Blogspot back in about 2004 and made the move to Typepad in 2005. At the time, Typepad seemed more active in terms of development and kept adding new features. Over the years, I tried Tumbler, and Posterous too, but the Typepad blog has been my main home (such that it was).

The Blogspot blog is still there, updated once a year or so. Tumbler I just don’t get, but Posterous is looking good for bookmarking and Twitter posts. I might keep that.

Until last week, my main blog remained with Typepad. I haven’t made too many demands on it over the years, and it’s served me well. However, lately I’ve been wanting to modify the theme a bit and add some widgets. What I could do on the site I found confusing and not all that intuitive. I wanted to do more, and in order to do that, I would have to move to a higher priced plan. So I started evaluating the service and what other options I had.

In the end, I moved to Squarespace, and here’s why.

1. Ease of use

Or perhaps it was familiarity? I first tried Squarespace when working with the Surrey Board of Trade. It took me a couple of days to replicate the entire, active Joomla site they had. Everything just clicked into place, and I liked that. I kept that site up for the Board over a couple of years and anytime I had any questions, help was there in less than an hour. On the other hand, I’ve always found the Typepad backend somewhat confusing. Not sure why.

2. Apparent lack of development at Typepad

When I was first at Typepad, there seemed to be lots of new stuff going on. A while ago, the company was bought by Say Media. Now Say Media is probably a very good media company, but they don’t seem to be paying as much attention to Typepad these days. Perhaps I was missing something, but Typepad just seemed to be getting old. I couldn’t even find a widget to include my Flickr feed on the site. At Squarespace, new stuff or improvements seem to appear on a regular basis, and I like that. The company seems growing and active.

3. A hosted service

I could have moved to a WordPress site like many others have done. That would have meant learning a whole new backend and deciding whether to use a hosted or self-hosted blog. I knew Squarespace, so the hosted option of WordPress just didn’t make much sense to me.

I also don’t want to deal with software maintenance. I like to tinker as much as the next guy, but I’m not a coder or that fond of maintenance. If I tinker, it’s usually to add something new or to get around an problem, not to keep something running and secure. I just find maintenance a time sink that I don’t need at this point in my life, so Squarespace it was.

4. Help

The help system for Squarespace is amazing. Got a problem, they’ve got an article for that. Perhaps there’s even a video, and if not, the online help is really responsive. ‘nuf said on that. Sure there are some things you can’t do, but for 99% of what I need, they’ve got me covered.

So how did the move go? Smooth as silk. All I had to do is export the blog at Typepad, import it into Squarespace using their import tool, do a couple of edits and the blog was up. A quick trip to my domain registrar and I’m back in business as donsca.ca.

Good stuff.

It seems the domain changes have taken place and both donsca.ca and donsca.com are pointing to this new site.

Good stuff.

Got to love those folks at Webnames, my domain registrar. When you change something on your domain, they get it out really quickly.

Enough for one day….