Another Opinion Among Many

Well, I found a directory on my Wordpress install that I didn’t install the contents of.  My wp-content/uploads/ folder had a directory /2007/12 in it, which, in itself, wouldn’t be much to raise concern, but it wasn’t “owned” by me.  My web host confirmed that all files should be owned by me.  I couldn’t delete the folder, it seems.  I sure wanted to, because it contained 100s of html pages that were all redirects to scummy splogger sites.  So, I guess that I got hacked.  Folks, upgrade your Wordpress as soon as you’re advised of a security release.

When I changed my cPanel password, some wierdness occurred.  If you were browsing my site this afternoon, you might have caught the moment where there was no database connection.  You see, when you change your cPanel password, it changes your mail, ftp, and mySql passwords as well.  It took a minute for the system to all get working again.  When I was checking the mail to ensure that it still worked, I noticed that I had almost 8,000 emails sitting in my default mail account.  I’ve not actually configured an email account, as I use Google’s Gmail redirect service, where I can forward mails received by corey@ to my Gmail email and send as corey@.  Why not use their spam filtering, rather than manage my own?  So, these were the emails that were being sent to any whatever @coreythompson dot com since October.  I am sure that all of it was SPAM, so I set up squirrelmail to show 1000 mails per page and used “toggle all” and sent them to my trash folder and then purged the folder.  I then set up my mail settings to bounce all email to addresses without forwarding with a “no such recipient” message.  Hopefully, this will keep the unwanted emails off my server.

What a sucky happenstance.

Wow.  Somehow, over the weekend, the visitor count just topped 50,000 unique IPs, which means at least 50,000 different IP addresses visited my site since I set up the counter, sometime in 2006.  So, that means my little ole site could have been visited by at least 50,000 people.  Thanks for coming to my spot, everyone!  BTW, the counter says 51,051 at the moment.

Hi everyone.

I’ve been thinking about tweaking a few things on my site as far as how it looks.  I’m not looking at a total redesign.  I just want to do a few edits to make it more visually appealing to those who don’t read it in their feed readers.

Is there anything about the layout that I should consider? (I really like this simple two-column design but am open to suggestions)

What about the colors? Links? Text decorations? If you have a color suggestion, could you indicate the hex color# or RGB value so I can see what you mean?

Are there any features that should be here that aren’t?

I’m open to suggestions.  And, remember that I don’t moderate comments actively.  If you get past Simple Spam Filter (which means you can write anything you want, as long as you click the button to prove that you’re human) and Akismet, your comment will show up right away.

Thank you.  I await…

This morning, I was late for work.

I did not leave late. It usually takes about 6-7 minutes to drive from my house to work. Today, I left, as usual, about 35 minutes before I was to start. But, I was 15 minutes late.

The reason that I was late is because there was a huge accident on the Westmoreland St bridge, which connects my area of the city to the south side. Both directions were blocked, so traffic was jammed up across the whole span. The southbound traffic is what usually fills the bridge in the morning. After a few folks in the inside lane realized that they were going nowhere fast, they U-turned northbound and headed off the bridge.

Once the way was clear, I did the same and headed for the Princess Margaret bridge, which was in the opposite direction from my workplace. I was only 15 minutes late.

There were several cars involved in the accident and I’ve not heard if anyone was seriously hurt or not. The road was bare this morning, but I imagine that, since it was -27°C this morning, some people had a hard time getting their cars started on time. Add that to a chronic late departure is a recipe for an accident any day. I see the same thing happen when it storms. These accidents happen because someone stopped paying attention at the wrong moment, usually because they’re in too much of a hurry.

Is dying or killing worth being “on time”? Personally, I’d rather be late and live. Or, even better, I check out the weather forecast the night before so that I know if I will have to get up a bit early to shovel my car out or if I have to allow extra time in case my car won’t easily start. It only takes a minute and I arrive alive. I sure wish that these poor folks, who at the least have smashed up cars, had done the same. Nobody needs the results of an accident.

I had to mention this, as I’m sure that its not always or even usually the case for most.

Merry Christmas to our Landlord.  Ever since you bought the building that I live in, you’ve only shown that you want to establish a long term relationship with your tenants through your immediate and continued improvements to the building.  Thank you for doing the unexpected and dropping off a fruit basket to us.  We appreciate this gesture more than you likely think.

Merry Christmas to the team at Friendlier.com, who host this site.  Not only have you instilled confidence in my assessment of your abilities as a host and your forward-looking vision of producing a quality experience for a reasonable price.  You have also proven that you sometimes actually do get what you pay for.  And, thank you for sending a quick email to wish a Merry Christmas to me (and likely your other hostees).  Most of us still do care about the small things and this small gesture has proven that you are looking forward to a long term relationship with your customers by actually paying attention to them once in a while.

My web host has advised me that they will be doing maintenance on the server tomorrow (15 Nov) between 8pm-10pm PST, which may cause my site or some of its services to become unavailable during that time.  Nobody likes down time, but everybody likes being told ahead of time! Thanks, Friendlier! You’re one notch farther up, in my estimation.

You can always visit my other site if you have a burning desire to see what I’m up to if this site is ever down.  Its located, of course, at http://mrcorey.com.

I wasn’t sure whether to do this post this soon or not, but I have some good things to say, so here it comes.

This is a mini review of my new web host, Friendlier.com. In response partially to a comment by Macbros, I write this post to give a decent idea of what my web host offers. Here’s what you can find in plain site on the front page of the home page:

FRIENDLY PLAN

• 100 GB Disk Space!
• 1000 GB/mo Traffic!
• 99,9% Server Uptime
• Free Domain for Life*
• 30Day Money-Back
• 24/7 Support
• No Set-up Fees
• Free Site Builder
• $4.95/month.

That’s the short list. I’ve colored the parts that I like the most. Honestly, after the uptime issues that I’ve had with XMGFree.com (which they’ve not really resolved - even now, over a year later - sorry Eric, I like you) and DSTInternet.com (you guys were unresponsive and slow to help - you get what you pay for), my priority is for uptime. After seeing that Friendlier.com had a good uptime record (via a site that showed various sites and their uptime), I was already interested in their service. I had already signed up at DSTInternet.com for a year’s service beginning at the end of April 2007. I am giving this hosting up and writing that purchase off. Sometime you get what you pay for and $2.95USD/mo is a good indicator of a cheap site (cheap on support).

You’ll notice that there are plenty of web hosting solutions presented to you via various ratings sites that fall in the $4.95-$7.95 per month range. I don’t think that there has to be a significant difference between hosts in that range. I do prefer to pay less, as most reasonable people do. The difference is that Friendlier.com (or Friendlyr.com) offers their wares at the lower end of the price scale with the features at the higher end.

By the way, the great uptime stats that I found out about may be attributed to the fact that their hosting is purchased from The Planet, which is the “number one privately held, dedicated server hosting provider in the world.” Many companies get their hosting from The Planet, as its got what it takes to host the largest, most demanding companies.

I must say that the generous disk space and the large bandwidth allotment is a good draw for me as well, but I doubt that I will ever need to worry about approaching my limits.

I like the fact that Friendlier.com uses cPanel. I missed that when I got my hosting with DSTInternet.com. I also like the fact that they have SSH access. SSH is one of the features that most hosts disable (except for the ones who pay a lot extra) it so that they won’t have to secure against it (which is just lazy). Its just so much more powerful when you want to maintain a website.

One thing that I like more than I thought that I would is the “chat” function of the support desk. Friendlier has a support staff that actually seems to know what they are doing and when you ask a question that is beyond the scope of the present support rep’s ability to answer, they tell you so and they advise that they will get someone who is qualified to answer your question to send you an email with an answer. How great is that?

I actually used the chat function before I signed up, as I was trying to find an alternative to my host at the time. The support person (I wish that I could remember - sorry) was free with answers to my questions.  I liked that they were automatically ready to answer my questions despite my not being a customer.

Things haven’t changed as far as that goes, as well.  I’m still getting great service.  I get to use cPanel, FTP, and SSH to access my site.  The pages load with blazing speed.  I’ve got lots of grow room, and best of all, the staff are still friendlier!

As any regular visitor to this site knows, I’m not big on advertising on my own site.  I’ve not felt the need to promote any particular product or company.  Occasionally, you’ve seen a widget go up temporarily when I was helping to beta test, or a plug for a site or cause that I wanted others to know about - without any intention of compensation for the plug.  This is going to remain true.  I will only promote what I believe in.  So, you may notice an affiliate link show up on my site for my new web host soon.  It will produce a small hosting compensation if anyone clicks through and decides to go with Friendlier.com

I will end this post here.  In case you didn’t figure it out from the above, I recommend that you consider Friendlier.com as your web host when you’re shopping around.