Where have I been?

Regular readers probably noticed about a week’s worth of silence around here. It started early last week when Angela tried to post something to her blog and had trouble getting it published to her site. Thinking it was probably just a temporary Blogger problem, she went about her life assuming it’d take care of itself in time. The next day, when I couldn’t publish either, we started to get worried. By the time Thursday rolled around without a fix in site, I started digging deeper.

Turns out the hosting company we were with had suffered some hack attack, and had pretty much locked down everything. While I could see my site, and I could FTP to it, that’s all I could do. The server was blocking ICMP traffic (Pings to this address got no response, for example) and it was obviously blocking Blogger’s publishing engine given the errors I was seeing there.

Since the person who originally got me on board with this host had moved on to another company, and the fees were coming due again, I contacted him to see if he could help out with either getting some information on what was happening or what I needed to do to get it fixed and wound up talking about options with the company he actually works for now. Turns out that he could offer me quite a bit more for basically what I was paying for at the old place. I liked the sound of that!

I signed up Thursday and set-up a reseller account on their servers. Friday evening was spent setting up accounts for both of my domains and Angela’s, uploading files, changing nameservers, etc. and etc.

Once I had all that done, Blogger was fine for Angela, but still not for me over the weekend. Her FTP path hadn’t changed, because I kept her hosting account name the same. I had changed my hosting account name and the first time I went to post, I just made the change on the publishing tab, but not the archiving or site feed tab, expecting to get an error about the FTP path for those, but once I saw the index publish I’d know I had everything correct. Well nothing published, and the error I got was “Your blog is under maintenance, please allow some time and try again”. My assumption, based on that error, was that Blogger was having some problem and it should be fixed relatively soon.

When I got to Monday with no resolution, I started looking a bit deeper. Turns out that this error actually indicates an error in the FTP settings, they just have it spit out a completely misleading error message. It seems that Blogger publishes the archive page first, then the site feed, then the index. Since I had the FTP path for the archive wrong, it was hitting that, stopping, and throwing up an error message. Had the error message said something about not finding the FTP path for the archive, I would have figured this out days ago. Instead, I just figured this out this evening.

Anyway, incredibly stupid error messages aside, things appear to be back to normal all the way around, everything’s running just fine at the new host, and I’m looking forward to adding some new things to my on-line world thanks to my new-found flexibility. I don’t know exactly what yet, but I’m looking forward to it anyway. 🙂

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