Another Opinion Among Many

Its been eleven months since I changed the design of this site.  Anyone who has persisted with my drivel over the years can attest that this is probably the longest period that this Wordpress installation has looked the same.  That is when I hacked Srinivasan G’s excellent Evanescence theme into what its become here.  I chose it because of the clean and clear code in the theme.  It allowed me to expand upon it and build something that I liked.  I can’t say that I won’t change again, but i still like what I came up with after all this time.  I may change it a bit here and there to either “tweak” what I have or to change the color a bit to reflect the season.  But, then again, I may not.

I checked out the websites of the commenters on the theme’s page and it looks like over 1/2 of them have kept the theme in use in its original design (which is quite classy, I must say).  I think that Srini should consider that a success.  And, although it really didn’t ever end up on my site in its original incarnation (especially since I snagged some code from another of his themes, which Ray uses), I am still content to use it as well.

So, have you kept the same theme? Are you happy with what you present to the world? Does it even matter to you?

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.

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.

If you have a website and you want to control the amount of unwanted bandwidth usage or simply don’t want some of your content indexed by the search engines or image scrapers, then Khalid’s article on the invesp blog is a valuable resource.  It presents the necessary elements of a robots.txt file in the clearest manner that I’ve seen yet.  Its a good read for any webmaster.

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.

I see that, for the most part, my site has propagated around the world to be pointing at Frihost’s server again. I don’t know how long this will last, as its quite burdened and this site doesn’t help much.

So, if you’ve noticed that some images are missing and that its not quite “the same”, it will be returned to normal over the next few days.

As my paid host says, “Thank you for your patience. I need a little more time.”

Bla bla bla…

I’ve been trying beer from all over the globe (especially from this wonderful country, of course), as you know, and have found some great beers. I don’t know if I’d appreciate the beers that I’ve tried as much if I had not made it myself in the past. Today, I had some cans of Holsten festbock. This, billed on the top of the can, is “strong dark beer”, as opposed to their maiboc, which is “strong golden beer”. They both are strong, weighing in at 7.0% alcohol/vol. Both are nice beers with a fairly strong malty, fruity taste at first and not a lot of aftertaste (a plus for a India pale ale drinker like myself). The maibock has a lighter taste than the festbock, commensurate with its color. The festbock is really dark. Its not as dark as Guiness or some full bock’s that I’ve seen and had, but its pretty dark. If you want a tasty way to get a fairly cheap buzz in this overtaxed country of Canada, try Holsten. I cannot recommend either of these offerings, as I like them both. There’s a Bavarian offering, Bavaria 8.6, which I think that I like more, but I’m not so sure.