Friends, I’ve some bad news. This web site is broken.

To the casual eye everything seems hunky-dory, I know. But deep within the bowels of MySQL-this and PHP-that, something has gone fatally awry. If you’re interested you can read my cry for help here—suffice to say, I’ve better things to do than troubleshoot lines of code!

A previous entry on the subject of free web stuff has got me thinking about moving my blog over to a free blog hosting site. There are lots of them out there, but hopefully you’ll agree that the two current heavyweights are Blogger and WordPress.

Blogger was the engine that brought blogging to the masses. Now that it’s been gobbled up by Google the new owners are working on a bunch of new features, like categories and posting via text message—features that I’ve had around here for quite some time.

This is what my site would look like on Blogger. You’ll notice that I was successfully able to integrate my badges from del.icio.us and Flickr, but I’m not wild about the template, and in my mind it’s the nicest one they’ve got.

WordPress.com is a free, hosted install of the very popular open-source engine available at WordPress.org. You can’t install the myriad of plug-ins or themes on the dot-com version, but you don’t risk wrecking your blog by doing so, either.

This is what my site will look like on WordPress.com—I say will because I’m a sucker for a good design, and WordPress’s implementation of my sidebar stuff is in my opinion much easier on the eyes. WordPress also gives me the option of a static start page, where I would put links to all my breadcrumbs spread so far and wide across the internet.

Now I just have to figure out what to do with all the stuff I’ve got here…

In days of old I would painstakingly tweak my travel photos in Adobe Photoshop and upload each and every one of them with a thorough description and appropriate links. I wouldn’t even have considered uploading videos, as the large file sizes would eat up my available server storage faster than you could watch them.

But this past weekend I placed my precious travel souvenirs in the very capable hands of Flickr and YouTube, both free services and current darlings of the social media set. It was such a painless experience that I’m starting to rethink this whole blog re-design thing.

Considering that this very page has permanent links to both my Flickr and del.icio.us accounts, and that I’ve also had a free Blogger account since 2003, maybe I can nix my monthly web server bill by having AC.ca re-direct to a start page that will list all these other accounts as links.

I’ll try to mock one up this week to show you what I mean…

We took the stage tonight in Banja Luka in 35-plus degree weather; two hours and buckets of sweat (not of the flop variety) later, we were done. Since then I’ve downed more than my share of Ozujsko Pivos, hobnobbed with British officers, offered to do the camp commander’s workload for the rest of the week, and generally made an ass of myself. This tour has been an absolute blast, and though there’s plenty of loved ones at home who are sorely missed, it’s also going to be hard to go back to being a nobody again…

Well, almost…

The British Merlin pilots who rescued us from a five-hour bus ride made our short trip even better by inviting us to sit, two at a time, on the lowered back ramp of the craft while in flight, giving us some spectacular aerial views of the countryside. And almost as soon as I took my position there the saucy pilots decided to pull some fancy flying maneuvers. I was doing fine until I made my way back into my seat, or more accurately, was slammed into it while the helicopter started a sudden and rapid climb.

A wave of nausea came pouring over me, but unlike two other unlucky passengers I wasn’t able to make a deposit into the barf bag handed to me. The queasiness stayed with me, though, and had to be slept off. I’m definitely not Air Force material…

On this, the morning after a show for our first International audience in Sarajevo, we’re calling in a favour and getting a ride to the camp at Banja Luca on board a British Merlin Helicopter.

Our show there is tonight; first thing tomorrow we leave for a one-night hotel stop in Zagreb, Crotia, then fly home.

Today’s war story: During the siege of Sarajevo, the Serbs offered well-heeled tourists a chance to “hunt” human prey. About five grand would get you a rifle and a spot overlooking sniper’s alley, where you could spend the afternoon taking shots at whatever struck your sick fancy…