For a couple of weeks, I have been in the process of changing the e.mail address that various parties have on file for me. Initially, a considerable amount of each day went into this chore. Now, it's just a few minutes here-and-there, when I am reminded of somewhere that I need to effect a change.

I think that it would probably bore the reader to relate the history of my e.mail addresses, so suffice it to say that I greatly value having a persistent e.mail address, and have had the same address for something on the order of 15 years, but it has been provided by a firm, AT&T, with which I can no longer comfortably do such business. I'll be using oeconomist.com for my email domain now, and hope that I can do so for at least 15 years.

I am visiting my parents because they were using the same firm for e.mail and for their webpage hosting, and are leaving it for similar reasons. I handled configuration of accounts and of e.mail handlers, and transferred WWW content.

I had been using that same firm as my ISP for about that same span, and as my land-line service provider since the acquisition of AT&T by SBC Communications. I have had my land-line disconnected, and turned to Sprint, my cellular telephone service provider, as my ISP. I'm using a Novatel Wireless™ MiFi™ 2200 Mobile Hotspot to connect to the 'Net. For about $100 more, I could have got a Sierra Wireless™ AirCard® W801 (AKA Overdrive™ 3G/4G) Mobile Hotspot, but Sprint doesn't provide and doesn't seem scheduled to provide a 4G network anywhere that I expect to find myself for a few years (after which time there will be new choices in such devices).

The string oeconomist (or œconomist) is an old-fashioned spelling of economist. I am an economist; whether I would be seen as an old-fashioned economist would be a function of what one saw of my premises, methods, and conclusions.

I am not the first person to have registered this site-name. The last previous registration expired on 4 September 2007. A check of the Wayback Machine turned-up no archived pages, so perhaps the name were never actually assigned to a site.

Various people have previously used oeconomist as a regular identifier. I am not amongst them. (In particular, I am not (and never have been) the oeconomist at LiveJournal and at Infotrope.)

The site name is registered with GoDaddy. They're not wonderful as a registration service, but they're acceptable.

Hosting is provided by FourBucks.net, so named because, if one orders their package of lowest price and one pays for their services a year at a time, the charge comes to about US$4 per month. I first went to FourBucks.net to get hosting for a different site a few years ago, at the recommendation of Ronnie Ashlock, who used and uses it to host Surlybird.com.

A while back, FourBucks.net was purchased by IDAGroup LLC. When last I knew, they'd not seemlessly integrated support. And AT&T has a proclivity to treat e.mail from FourBucks.net as spam.

The 'blogging software that I'm presently using is WordPress. At the suggestion of Gaal, I added support for OpenID. I did this by installing a plug-in, WP-OpenID. Another plug-in, Post Levels, allows me to assign levels to posts and to registered users, such that when users are logged into the site they are able to read any posts at or below the level of their registration. And YATCP modifies the interface to support a tree structure of comments (so that comments meant in reply to other comments are nested under then and so forth). I also added WP-Polls, mostly just for minor fun. And I will look into Edit Comments XT, to give commenters an opportunity to fix typos and to withdraw things written in haste.