Last weekend I moved all of my websites from my expensive dedicated server solution to a shared server solution. So far everything has been working out great - the transfer of files went fine, and some of the automatic services that are setup for you, such as automatic secure webmail which is always nice to fall back on when you’re at say, a public kiosk or something. The switch saves me approx. US$720 a year, which is going to be great for my finances. However, I’m always wary when I move to a new place that something is going to be horribly wrong, so it’s watch-like-a-hawk time.

One of the consequences of moving to the new server is using IMAP for reading mail. I am amazed, shocked and appalled that I didn’t discover this earlier, but mutt has a caching mechanism, which increases the joy of reading both large Maildir mailboxes and IMAP mailboxes. To enable, just put set header_cache="/path/to/some/directory" in your .muttrc file - things go 10x faster after the first cache.

In the same spirit of switching for a new year, I decided to switch my finances up a little bit. I’m currently migrating to using the StackBacks system for managing finances. This is the budget for the generation of consumers who would rather carry around a debit card than a bunch of cash, and is especially good for weaning yourself from credit cards. At the same time, I’m switching banks from a national chain to a local credit union.