At Camp 3, Setting Up The Tents, Cooking Soon

Update 2018: Media Temple turned out to be bogus, we’re now on a major VPS provider that seems to be working well. But you never know. A total jungle out there.

PM Update:
We’re pretty much done with our website improvement push, including setting up with our new hosting at MediaTemple.com. Bummer was a few hours ago they already had a server outage of about 8 minutes. That’s somewhat a gut punch, as the whole idea behind this expensive and time consuming server change is to make WildSnow reliably available on Mondays, our biggest day.

Sigh, if necessary we’ll switch again as I’ve got little patience with the bozos who set up these hosting companies and act like they’re the solution to all your problems (when half the time the much vaunted company is probably a couple computers run by three guys in a basement who are searching for their lost pocket protectors because it just went dark when they tried to plug in an Xbox and blew a fuse — hence they can’t answer the phone when you call about your website not working.)

To figure it out I’ve set up a server monitoring service that tests WildSnow every 5 minutes.

Morning Post:
New host/server is working well, but we’re taking time to tweak some backend stuff that’ll make WildSnow better. Using up this morning’s blog time for that, but trust me, it’ll be worth it as the site will run better and be more accessible.

4 Responses to “At Camp 3, Setting Up The Tents, Cooking Soon”

1. Clyde July 14th, 2008 10:01 am

   Please get rid of the obnoxious message at the top of your RSS feed. Or if you insist on leaving it up, provide the entire post with photos to RSS like all the other blogs. The way it is now, you are discouraging readership.

2. Rogier July 14th, 2008 10:09 am

   I agree completely with Clyde

3. Lou July 14th, 2008 10:37 am

   Guys, apologies for that. I’m getting my feed stolen and used for content, have to do that statement in the interim while I figure out some other stuff to defend with. That’s why I just changed to a summary, with the obnoxious statement.

   This is so typical, criminals out there make me do something that messes with good people’s needs such as you guys.

   Come to think of it, if I’m publishing a summary feed, I can probably take the “stolen” message off or move it to the bottom of the feed where my plugin originally put it.

   Part of this project is to upgrade WordPress for various reasons. When I do, most of my plugins will probably stop working anyway. So one thing at a time here. Though I’ll get that message off now that I’m using summary.

   Thanks to both of you for your feedback.

4. Lou July 14th, 2008 10:56 am

   Theft defense text now moved to end of feed, you won’t even see it in the feed till we go to full feed again instead of summary. Even then, if I can implement some better feed scraper defense, I’ll get rid of it entirely.

   The statement seems to have discouraged much of the scraping, as it’s done by robots and they’re difficult to keep re-coding to strip things out of individual feeds. Please have understanding about what’s going on here. We get a lot of traffic thanks to folks like you guys and have a good Google pagerank, which is great but makes the website content thieves look at us like a mosquito viewing a person sun bathing without bug repellent. At times we’re getting attacked in in a big way by comment spammers and content scrapers. Defense actually takes a significant amount of time out of my week.