Category Archives: Blog tribulations

Blog tribulations, Hardware/Software, Stupidity plain and simple

Midphase / ANhosting loses a customer

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Update October 4, 2010: I canceled a two-year account and received no refund, even though there was over a year and a half remaining on my account. Thanks for nothing, Midphase / ANhosting.

Folks, leave this outfit in the dust and ignore their fancy recruiting website.

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Some time ago I switched hosts. Now that I’ve experienced interminable load times with no sign of of a fix for a week while using Midphase / ANhosting, I’m back with lunarpages.

How not to impress a customer looking for support

A litany of excuses:

  • Our slow load times are because of this specific WP plugin.

Okay, so I’ll just disable all of my plugins on all of my sites and shoot that theory to hell. You betcha.

  • The reason our CPanel is so slow to load/freezes today is because we’re doing server maintenance. We’ve switched so many of our customers to your server that other users are hogging all of the bandwidth.

Right. But what about the past seven days with the same problems? Uh-huh.

  • Google is taking up too much bandwidth by indexing all of the sites on your server during the day, so we’re limiting access to everyone until the early morning hours.

I didn’t even get up early in the morning to check that one out. Give me a break.

Bye bye Midphase. So long ANhosting. I don’t think I’m gonna cry.*

*With apologies to the Everly Brothers.

Blog tribulations, Hardware/Software

WordCampTV is a snore

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It’s a time waster.

I don’t mean to pick on this guy. I’ve viewed more than a few videos, and most of them were timewasters like this one.

  • Three minutes to get the computer working.
  • Another two minutes of wasting my time to get to the final product. Five minutes wasted.
  • An un-viewable overhead screen.

Presenter comments: “It hurt my head.” “Blown away.” “Not a big fan of phpBB.”

Okay, so we know he doesn’t like bbPress or phpBB. That could have been covered by a single statement, not 15 minutes of video. So far, 15 minutes of my time has been wasted and I’ve learned nothing.

Audience members ask questions, but I have no idea what questions are asked because I can’t hear them.

Now he checks his phone. Is a nuclear attack imminent?

The speaker likes vBulletin, but the actual site is clunky. Welcome to the world of computers. When you can’t solve the site’s problem, why waste my time telling me about it for five or ten minutes? I’m smart enough to know that more than likely, I’m going to have the same problems.

He can’t get into his computer for some of the overheads. What’s the point of the process if he can’t demonstrate? Mind you, that doesn’t really matter because we can’t see most of them anyway, even when the camera occasionally focuses onto the viewing screen.

So far, I’ve burned half an hour and we’re nowhere.

Apparently, this thing ran for an hour but I shut it down after 37 minutes. I just couldn’t stand it any longer. Thank goodness there’s a sidebar link to notes.

I went with Simple:Press Forum. It too is a plug-in that integrates nicely with WordPress.

Blog tribulations

I’ve been plagued with a pox of spam bots

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I don’t know whether to laugh or cry about these dumbasses. Aren’t they aware that there are plugins available to block them? They don’t care about that though.

Before installing a plugin I was getting 80 to a hundred attempted comment spam posts – which ended up in my approval que. Now they can’t get through at all, thanks to Bad Behavior and an access key from Project Honey Pot.

I’m left wondering why or how they all of a sudden chose my site to bombard with their endless stream of stupidity. I must have pissed someone off when I used samspade.org to blow the cover of a couple of spammers and report them to their hosts.

On a more constructive note, I’ve now changed the god-awful sidebar and footer colors to something new. It will be easier on the eyes, I trust. In know it’s easier on my eyes.

Blog tribulations, Hardware/Software

All done and running

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Earlier today I finished updating my fourth site, and they’re all good to go now. I’m surprised at how little effort it actually took. In the event of problems I had backups, but basically all it amounted to was chasing down a few misguided urls in a database file and re-doing a single page on another blog.

I have never liked switching DNS servers. Since I can’t actually remember the last time I did switch – it was probably seven or eight years ago – I was concerned, but WordPress made it all pretty pain-free.

Of course, I had pages saved from two sites that outlined the procedures they used, so I wasn’t completely in the dark. I followed them to the letter for the most part, and here we all are.

Perhaps I’ll work on the colors tomorrow.

Blog tribulations, Hardware/Software, Stupidity plain and simple

Backing up matters

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Always remember to take the occasional look in your rearview mirror.

How the JournalSpace operator plans to recover: here. Or not.

Google Cache to the rescue — but only if…

this method only works for people who did not have their blogs/journals set to be viewable only by other JournalSpace members, or set to Friends &/or Favorites only, and for other entries that were not set to private. Also, if people configured their blogs so that the googlebot, or other bots were blocked, they may have limited success in resurrecting old entries from the cache

I was fortunate to learn hard lessons about backups decades ago while working on an aircraft project which shall remain unnamed. I’ve never forgotten since.

Oh, all right then, perhaps I have “forgotten” a time or two, but to no consequence.

So far.

Blog tribulations, Stupidity plain and simple

WordPress is getting a tad tiresome

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I had a new implementation of WordPress installed on a motorcycle site, which was previously written in html. I wasn’t aware of any problems with the WordPress visual editor until I encountered it on the new site. I did a search and was able to come up with quite a few solutions, but none of the solutions worked for me — or for many others, it seems. No big deal. Find a thread, post a question, and someone will eventually come up with something that works.

It would appear that some of us have touched a WordPress nerve, thus we have this:

and here’s a general rant to those of you that are whining that your threads arent getting replied to (ive seen like 7-8 in the last 4 hours) — its a fucking holiday in the US (where 90% of us live), and some people dont spend them online. Im ONLY here because Im working. Get a grip — your dumb little “i cant get my adsense to show up” or your “i want an archives page” crap isnt more important than someone spending a damn holiday with their family, and away from a bunch ingrates that cant use a search box. FFS, most of you dont even say please, or thank you.

Go here if you want to see the thread. I’m the guy with the palm tree in my avatar.

As a result of this, I have decided to leave my site in html and remove WordPress. It looks much better the way it is, and editing the html is a breeze for me.

Thanks, but no thanks, WordPress.

Link to site here.

Furthermore, I get absolutely no spam on the site since it’s in html. It’s not a high-traffic site, but it does get three to four hundred hits a month, purely for the technical articles.

And whooami, male or female WordPress goowill ambassador that you are, you’ll find sympathy in the dictionary, somewhere between shit and syphilis.

Now for the history lesson

You knew it was coming, right?

The “it’s a fucking holiday in the U.S. of A.” that whooami makes reference to is called Thanksgiving. It’s celebrated in the U.S. as a time when invading religious zealots gave thanks to the native North American population for letting them come ashore, bringing religious fervor, pestilence, slaughter, mass displacement and ownership to an otherwise pretty satisfied people as a whole.

Outside of North America, I can’t think of one other country or nation that celebrates Thanksgiving. Certainly not Mexico or Central America, where visitors from Europe (for you geography-challenged Americans, that’s a continent, not a country) brought disease, more pestilence, religion-induced slaughter, and conquest to a civilization that was more than a little advanced. Obviously, Europeans (people living on a continent, not a country) don’t celebrate Thanksgiving.

South America (another continent, consisting of many countries) doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving. Nor does Asia, Australia, Africa, the Middle East and on and on and on. So basically, we have a country of 330 million people, far outnumbered by the remainder of the known world, completely in ignorance of the other six billion scattered here and there on the globe.

Oh well, it was ever thus.