Good morning world!

OK not really, it is Monday after all! But I figured I’d let you all in on the latest news surrounding this site. First, in old news the site for That Hosting Company is online again, with the simple message that there is a “Server Update in Progress, please check back in 60 minutes”. That message has been there since Saturday! Don’t let my boss get hold of one of those clocks, where 60 minutes =48 hours! *L* I hope those of you still waiting get something a bit more useful from them soon!

Ready Hosting did, indeed get back to me on the stats problem I was having. (On a Sunday morning even, when I had written it off until Monday, pretty cool) Turns out my domain name is too long for the stats program accounts so they had to shorten it to give me a logon for that server. After looking at the program though, I’ve decided to keep StatCounteX running. The onsite package seemed to have some issues, like it didn’t recognize Google as a search engine. (How else do you explain a stats package that says you got 14 hits referred from google.com but no search engine hits or keywords?) I just like the package I was already using, and it’s open source so if there are some small things I need to tweak, I can do it myself!

We’ve been having a bizarre occurrence at home the last few days, it seems that the site for the YACCS commenting system is unreachable to us from our home ISP. What that means is that I can’t get to their site, and whenever one of us goes to sites that use YACCS, like my wife’s blog or my child abuse survivor blog, the comment links don’t actually appear. I’m assuming it’s a cache or DNS problem with the ISP because it’s on all of our computers at home, and I can get them from work or through any other connection, just not at home.

I’m making a list of small projects to work on this weekend, as outside of a Blue Jackets game Saturday night, I’ll have the rest of the weekend free while Angela is visiting her parents. There’s some small tweaks to the commenting and stats databases I want to do, which you won’t see, but I’m also looking at doing an RSS feed, contrary to what I said earlier. I’m going to only send out the title’s in the feed though, so you can subscribe and know when I’ve updated, but you will still have to come experience the posts in context with the other posts and the comments, which is important, at least to me. I’m also thinking about an email list that will do the same thing, but the 5 minute solution to that, Bloglet, doesn’t really make me happy. For example, I’m updating now early in the morning, do I really want my readers to wait until midnight to get an email saying I’ve updated? I want something more immediate, and that will only send the title’s, which blogger’s email system doesn’t support at this point. So that’s going to require me to do it myself. (*mental note* Check the TOS of this hosting company, see what kinds of email lists you’re allowed */mental note*) What do you think, would you subscribe to either one? Is the RSS feed enough or would you like email as well?

One last thing before I go do some actual work, during the time the site was down last week I noticed myself feeling very out of touch with the whole blogging community. I couldn’t even read other people’s blogs because I felt like an outsider, like I couldn’t really contribute and be part of the scene until my site was back up again. I’ve never felt that way when I’ve chosen not to blog for a day or two, but there’s something about having it forced on you that changes the whole perspective. I think there are lots of things where that is true, you don’t mind some things when you volunteer to deal with them, but when you are forced to, it takes on a whole new meaning.

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