30 September 2003
Well, that was fun. Server troubles became worse still, although my hosting company kept me informed, which is to their credit. In amongst the ‘we’ve tried this; didn’t work; next it’s this’ emails, I discovered that they were willing to switch me over to a Windows 2003 plan (from Windows 2000) for free. Which was nice. (In fact, they’d mentioned this in every single email they sent me, I just didn’t take the hint.)
So, one DNS change later, and here we are. I should point out that the changes haven’t propogated to me yet; I’m using a temporary domain alias to post this. The most obvious change for me is the new control panel, offering more of its two components: control and panel. As I write this I haven’t checked everything, so I’m not sure it’s all going to work; there are certainly some bits that I can’t find right now. But on the plus side, tasks like setting MIME types by file extension, assigning custom error pages (not just 404), and creating subdomains are far easier. It also looks a whole lot nicer.
Apart from that, I see no great differences. A change in server name, a change of FTP username, a change of log directory (from log to logs), and, um, greater reliability.
I can’t blame the lack of posting solely on the server, though. I’ve been able to access the site often enough to post if I wanted to, and it’s not like there’s been a lack of things to post about. I’ve continued re-ripping my CDs to Monkey’s Audio format, unearthing some previously un-ripped gems in the process. I’ve watched some films I hadn’t seen before, and you might not have seen them either. Sport in general, and football in particular, has been Happening: Hoddle sacked, Birmingham fourth, rape alleged, Real defeated, Deportivo defeated, a hat-trick of hat-tricks scored, and that’s without mentioning last week’s UEFA Cup matches.
Instead, I’ll blame it on the weather. I’m convinced, or at least my body is, that autumn as a season no longer exists: we go straight from summer to winter, and the leaves fall off whenever. So for the last week or so I’ve been trying to hibernate, with no great success. Once I’m over the transition all will be well once more.
I’ve also been thinking about the site — transferring it from one server to another does that to you. I’m going to clean up the directories and make me a proper test site, rather than trying things on the main one. And ‘things’ includes comments, which is what I’ve mostly been thinking about and will be the subject of a forthcoming entry.