Most of you probably didn’t even notice this, since it didn’t take 24 hours like the one in the idiot webhost.

I noticed the site was down, at about the same time as a friend must’ve noticed it since he mentioned it while I was checking things. I knew it couldn’t've been down for more than a few minutes because I’d just done some other stuff.

I started pushing buttons–my usual stuff like ping (worked), tracert (didn’t work), and cPanel access (didn’t work).

I wrote up a trouble ticket. When I pushed the button to submit it, the next screen mentioned that there was a current known issue described as “An Administrator Is Investigating Performance On The Server.” It occurred to me that there was a chance that my problem was related, so I held off on the ticket (saving them the time of replying to it, incidentally, while still letting me know that they were already hitting it with a rock).

I monitored the situation as browser error messages changed–most of the time it was “the connection has timed out,” though once it was “the connection was reset” as stuff changed on the other end of things.

And then, it worked again. They actually fixed something. Quickly.

*gives seal of approval to Bluehost’s competent webminions*

If you’re wondering about all the fun I had with MySiteSpace, click here to read the text of the actual tickets.

No more waiting for Fantastico’s obnoxious 2-week turnaround times; I downloaded WPAU and used it to upgrade to Wordpress 2.3. It looks so far like nothing broke, I think. Now to figure out tags…

It turned out to be a problem in FileZilla (which had previously worked on this computer), which I found out by installing the latest version of FileZilla not on their advice but out of desperation to try ANYTHING and disgust with being told the same thing repeatedly (or in one case, something inaccurate).  It wasn’t even a case of different support representatives not staying in contact–most of my so-called support was from one rep, who must be getting paid by tickets closed because JEEZ.

Transcript to follow shortly.  Goodbye, MySiteSpace.  I got started with you guys on a free account and traded up when they went away, and I learned a lot here about how to make websites, but I won’t tolerate “service” that ignores a problem.

I’m now officially looking for a different host.  Feedback is welcome in comments (i.e. ad comments for hosting services will be considered on-topic, not spam).  Expect another update shortly.

Long story short, MySiteSpace is screwing up repeatedly and in a remarkably inane way (server glitches, well, that happens; closing support tickets without the issue being resolved on the other hand is not something I’m into putting up with), so a hosting service move is probably pending.  So, the place may disappear without warning for a while at some point.

This isn’t a decision I’m making lightly; I expect it to be a pain in the neck to get everything set up.  But their response time had been slipping for a while and this was the last straw.

A rounded handful of months ago, I started using Palatino Linotype on my old flat-file journal. Now, everywhere I go, guess what font I see…on the one hand, it’s kind of neat to see more of a font I actually like. But on the other hand, I almost feel like I should change what I use, since it’s becoming “popular.”

You know, that thing that’s on the same domain as the blog, but not the blog itself. Link’s at the top of the screen, under the banner, if you care to check it out.

Threw some new content into the Writing page (you know you wanna click it).

Changed styles.css to match page text to banner text ’cause a random neuron fired and I decided that’d be a nice idea.

We’re now running Wordpress 2.0.6, after 2.0.7 came out of course. I do wish that MySiteSpace.com would roll out the Fantastico upgrade options faster. Their slowness, even with security upgrades, is making me second-guess whether to step up to 2.1 right away or wait until 2.1.4 or so for more of the security kinks to be worked out.
But, here’s the really crazy thing…it actually went smoothly. Only one thing ever even looked like a glitch, and that was because I needed to do a cache-override refresh.

The template has been figured out, the new index format has been rolled out, and the new versions of pages are beaming in. Enjoy the new look!

http://www.LostWelshmanMine.com/

Now if only my parental units or Uncle Robert or Kacey would come up with some content so I could figure out how to actually put the thing together…no, I do not pull these things straight from thin air…