New Web Host

March 30th, 2008 by Mox

A couple of days ago on a message board I read, a friend asked for web host recommendations. Two other friends responded with high marks for Dreamhost. I haven’t been terribly thrilled with the performance offered by my previous host, so I’ve been considering a move for some time but never took the time to research a new one. With a recommendation that I could trust, now seemed like as good a time as any.

The move has been reasonably smooth, and I’m impressed with how much control I have over my account. There has also been a noticeable increase in performance. However there has been one strange DNS issue that I haven’t been able to resolve just yet. Adding “www” in in front of my domain still points to the old host. I may be the only the only one that sees this problem, though. If I SSH in to either the old or new host and ping the “www” URL, it resolves to the new host in either case. No amount of rebooting or DNS flushing locally has fixed it so it is probably my ISPs DNS cache that hasn’t fully caught up with the new info.

Fortunately, I’ve been able to work around this by configuring WordPress to use the domain name without “www” on both the old and new sites. WordPress will rewrite the URL if the “www” is added so you should always get to the proper site. This is only a temporary solution, however, because it requires that I maintain the site on both hosts.

I have also taken this opportunity to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, which was just released yesterday. It was a very painless process, as most upgrades have been in the past. There should be no noticeable difference in the look or operation of the site as the biggest changes seem to be in the admin interface, but I haven’t yet had a chance to look into all the new features.

Update: 48 hours later, it would seem that my ISP’s DNS has finally caught up with the rest of the world.

Email Outage

June 11th, 2007 by Mox

Due to a stupid configuration error on my part while preparing to activate Google Apps for Domains, my mail server was unreachable for most of the day Sunday, 6/10. Depending on the persistence of your own mail server, email sent to me during that period may have been lost. I apologize for the inconvenience.

Site Redesign

January 17th, 2006 by Mox

It’s a new year, so now seems as good a time as any to start fresh.

The biggest change you’ll notice is the move from Geeklog to WordPress. I’ve been playing around with WordPress off and on for about a month and I really like its simplicity and ease of use on both the front and back ends. Installation and setup is a breeze and the interface is fairly easy to navigate. I found a layout that I liked and was able to adapt it into a usable WordPress theme with only a few days of work. It’s not quite finished yet, but the basics are there and solid enough for me to get going. I’m going to miss some of the features of a full featured CMS like being able to define and arrange content blocks on various parts of the page. On the other hand, it seems that coding those kinds things are fairly straightforward should I decide there is a feature I really can’t live without.

The switch to WordPress brings with it another benefit: podcasting. I’ve been seriously considering putting together a podcast ever since I attended the Portable Media Expo back in November, and WordPress is a bit more podcast-friendly as far as RSS feeds go. I haven’t decided what the format of the show will be but it will likely be called SquareRoots Radio.

Hopefully I’ll be able to put this site to some good use in the coming year.