The Sideshow was begun in mid-November of 2001, was designed on Notepad (although now I use the far-superior TextPad), and has been hand-coded throughout its tenure, hosted on my own web space.
Eventually, a comment widget from Haloscan was added by popular request, which worked out fine for a while until Haloscan was gobbled up by JS-Kit, who wanted money and also provided a crummy service called Echo. Then they jacked up the price to ridiculous proportions. I'm sure this convinced a lot of other bloggers to switch over to another method entirely, but for me it has mostly entailed private grumbling and the recognition that I was going to have to move to Blogger.
With the notice recently appearing at the top of the Echo comment threads to the effect that "This commenting widget will be discontinued on October 1st, 2012," the time has come, starting on that date.
My plan is to continue to write posts in TextPad and preserve them on disk, but post them here. This doesn't mean they will be any cleaner - typoes and mindoes will undoubtedly continue - and I don't like giving up total control, but that's life. Right now I'm just trying to figure out how to get control of general appearance and blogroll.
The Sideshow archives will remain where they are until...well, something else happens that makes me do otherwise.
- Avedon Carol