It's the official announcement of the debut of The Mundane Mid-Life Show! It's my attempt at a Podcast that will be a "supplement" to the My Mundane Mid-Life blog. I hope to create these on a somewhat regular basis (bi-weekly? Who knows...) Check out the shows that are available on the new Podcast page.
Many thanks to Mark Blasco at Podcast Themes for writing the great music for the show! (If you're a podcaster, be sure to check him out. He's great to work with and I can't complain one iota about the stuff he produced!)
After my forced absence, I have picked-up my toys and moved to a new host. So, I bring you My Mundane Mid-Life live from A Small Orange!
Did everything make it over? Well, I think so. Comments may still be a bit wonky (looks like they're going to be Moderated for a while, so if you don't see your comments right away, you'll know why), but at least I've upgraded successfully to MovableType 3.15! Hey, I'm just happy some of this publishes! More some other time, I'm just hoping I've got everything up and running that I wanted to!
To my frequent, not so frequent, and irregular readers, to my RSS Feed readers, and to the people that stumble here from the various search engines:
I am being FORCED to shutdown my blog. Yes, the administrator of my webhosting service suspended my account and I am not being allowed to run MovableType on his host.
Why? Well the CPU usage for mt.cgi shot through the roof and was averaging 80%.
Why? Because of a certain thing going on in the industry - Comment Spamming. As ANY user of MovableType knows, MT just doesn't hit a CPU utilization of 80% and sit there. MT only runs when you - as an author - are posting or rebuilding. How often is that? For me - it's barely once or twice a day. And if you use the product, you know how quick that happens.
So you just know that the issue are those damn Comment Spammers. I'm running MT 2.661 and MT-Blacklist. While this has been helpful to stop a lot of the spamming, it still happens. the MT log is filled with rejected attempts to comment. I was also starting to get hit with Trackback Spam as well.
Version 2 of MT - as far as I recall - DID perform poorly when a spammer attacked a site. I have been putting-off upgrading because of other plugs-ins I use and there compatibility with MT 3. It's been getting so bad lately that I didn't give a damn - I was going to upgrade anyway.
Then I got suspended. I guess the reason why I am just SO PISSED-OFF RIGHT NOW is that I feel that this was a knee-jerk reaction that was a bit out my control, and it was happening right in the middle of me deciding to upgrade and potentially fix the issue. The only reason this website is up right now is the admin renamed the MT directory (and password protected it) and told me I cannot use the product anymore on his box.
He is also NOT allowing me to upgrade to MT 3.15. So, that's it. I have to shutdown MT. There will be no more additions to this blog for as long as it's on the current webhost box.
Now, that doesn't mean this is over. Oh, no - not by any means. The website will remain up and you can always view the archives here. THE COMMENT AND TRACKBACK FEATURES OF MY BLOG ARE NOW INOPERABLE.
My INTENT is to find a a new webhosting service, preferably one that understands MT (I have a feeling that the admin of this host has no clue what the product is or does).
If anyone out there has any recommendations for a webhost that has good pricing, good service, and may have a clue about MovableType, PLEASE CONTACT ME IMMEDIATELY. I have one lead that seems to have good pricing with what I think is GREAT bandwidth and GREAT storage. And let's be frank - it's all about the money. I ain't making any money from this site.
I mean, for cripes sake - this is just a personal website with a bunch of pictures and a blog, people! It's not like it's a huge e-commerce site!
I really didn't want to move - I've been using a reseller for this website, and Jeff has been absolutely great over the years. I really don't want to leave him, but the admin has forced my hand and I don't have a choice.
*sigh*
So, thanks Jeff for the great service over the years. Thank you to the readers who have stopped by here over the years.
I hope to see you within a few days/weeks (better not be months!) when we're back up and running at a new host!
Don't forget, drop me a line with recommendations! Also, if you know of anybody (even yourself) that would be interested in transferring MT and the blog(s) to the new host, I am willing to entertain hiring somebody to just do it for me (my time is a bit limited recently, and if I can (reasonably) pay somebody to pick-up my MT/MySQL installation and plop it down on a new host, I would love to do it. Remember - MT is shut down and do I have any valid recent exports of my data? HELL NO! Can we do the transfer just doing MySQL exports?) I am even willing to entertain a website redesign (for $$$) if anyone wants to quote me that as well. Any way, please help me!
An error occurred: Connection error: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock' (2) posted 4/28/2004 10:53:04 AM
All of the nameserver changes have been made and the DNS propagation is over. The new site is on the new host - only problem is that MovableType is no longer functional. I'm hoping to get this fixed soon. Sorry for the lack of posts. Oh, since MT isn't working, that means you can't comment on any of my entries! posted 1/22/2004 08:19:52 PM
Time to move! I'm moving to a new host since I can't get any performance or reliability out of the old hosting service. DNS changes are in the works - see you in a few days! posted 1/18/2004 09:50:30 AM
WEBSITE OUTAGE So, do you believe me know about how much my hosting company sucks? This is getting ridiculous.
Here's more proof - they're nowhere near 99% uptime for the year.
Well, it's time to shake-up the design. I'll be s-l-o-w-l-y rolling the changes through the full website. If you see pages that have a green header and a green navigation bar on the left side, these are the "old style" pages. If you have a gray header and a gray left column for navigation, these are the "new style" pages. posted 3/18/2003 10:01:28 PM
Well, I can't stand it any more... my Web Hosting company sucks when it comes to reliability and uptime. I am starting to use a monitoring service called Alertra to monitor uptime. I will post all the outages here. WARNING!!!! It may get lengthy!!! posted 3/10/2003 06:48:44 PM
I'll be upgrading MovableType to 2.6 and rolling-out a new design for the website over the next week or so - once the website has been restored, that is (It's been down over 2430 35 hours now due to hardware failure - drive controller). Why does this always happen when you've carved-out time to do a big change and you can't because the server is dead? posted 2/17/2003 10:10:49 PM
I have finally come up with a way to organize/display my photographs - by using MovableType. I have begun the process of putting some of the photos online. I have started with some of my old photos working with Bill Jackson. The process will be very slow and tedious, but I will get more pictures up as time permits. posted 12/06/2002 10:28:06 AM
I've migrated my main Blog - My Mundane Mid-Life - from Blogger Pro to MovableType. There are bumps along the way. Search engines may have some issues. I have deleted old Blogger html files, which means some search engines will wind-up at this site with referrals but the pages are gone. This will all get resolved once the search engine bots and spiders re-crawl the website. posted 11/04/2002 11:43:16 AM
I'm starting the long journey of moving my blogs from Blogger Pro to MovableType, thanks to a jump-start from Quinn. The biggest problem I'm running into is trying to incorporate MT into my existing website (which is more than just a blog, which MT seems to assume). I'm importing my Blogger entries now - it's taking quite some time (730 entries). So PLEASE be patient with me over the next week or so as I start moving things over, a piece or tool at a time. posted 10/23/2002 02:17:19 PM
WARNING - DNS CHANGE IN PROGRESS - EVERYTHING SHOULD RESOLVE WITHIN 48 (maybe 72) HOURS FROM NOW
Here we go again!!! I guess my hosting provider isn't happy with those Windows/IIS servers (Shock! Horror! Utter amazement!!!), so this site is moving still again. posted 8/22/2002 11:00:14 AM
WARNING - DNS CHANGE IN PROGRESS - EVERYTHING SHOULD RESOLVE WITHIN 48 (maybe 72) HOURS FROM NOW
My hosting service is putting this site on a new server. Don't know why, and I received no advance notice. It appears to still be IIS 5.0. posted 6/17/2002 04:45:47 PM
Added a new "fade" effect to the images in my blog. I thought the photos just stood out too much, so I thought that by adding an opaque effect with fade would "de-emphasize" them. The effect is from Dynamic Drive. posted 6/14/2002 10:07:18 AM
WARNING - DNS CHANGE IN PROGRESS - EVERYTHING SHOULD RESOLVE WITHIN 48 (maybe 72) HOURS FROM NOW
My hosting company contacted me about the bandwidth of the website. I've made some internal changes to the site to cut down the bandwidth usage, but I'm moving servers anyway, to an IIS 5.0 server. The DNS changes should take 24-48 hours (typically). However, I've got a problem. With no code changes at all, some SSI code that was working fine on the Unix box, don't work on IIS. The My Mundane Mid-Life blog webpage can be executed with a parameter in the URL that will select an archive file to be displayed instead of the current blog.
It's supopsed to include one file if there is a parameter, another file if there isn't a parameter passed. Works on Unix. On IIS, both #Include statements execute!
The next piece of code includes the blog or archive file, based on the parameter passed in:
Added a new "twist" on guestbooks - A guestmap! It allows the user to place their location on a world map, as well as comment like a normal guestbook. You can test the feature by signing the guestmap here. posted 5/02/2002 12:08:13 AM
Transfer of the My Mundane Mid-Life blog to this website from Blog*Spot is complete. posted 5/01/2002 12:31:22 AM
All of the base pages are now roughed-in. Starting to handle all of the Blogger pieces to transfer the My Mundane Mid-Life blog to this website from Blog*Spot. posted 4/30/2002 11:26:59 PM
Just starting to put together the template designs. No idea when "go-live" will be. posted 4/17/2002 06:23:43 AM
