Dave’s Ramblings

If you have not seen it yet, there is a new hack for phpBB out in Beta test, the Blog Mod, now up to v0.2.0, it’s working so well I’ve moved into production so all of my forum members can now have a blog of their own, mostly to keep track of their saltwater reef tanks and things along that line, provides them with a great record keeping service, but also adds a bunch pages to the allinurl of the site, search engines are chewing through them like crazy! Very feature rich , the only issue I have with it thus far is that by default it is so customizable that it may be daunting for some users and they may be getting lost in the options, that would explain why most are using the default layout. Oh wait I still fit in that category for WordPress, one of these days I’ll make this a bit more presentable.

I’ve added a couple of new templates to the Mod, so we’ll see as time goes by what everyone thinks. If you’d like to see it in action, here is the listing of publically viewable blogs, and my personal Reef Journal can be viewed as well…

Harnessing the popularity of Blogs in general and tie them to Google tearing through them, this can only give things a boost.

Now this is going too far, money and time being pissed away on the dumbest things. The best thing ABC could come up with this morning is that 5 out of 6 people don’t know the difference between search engine results and sponsored results? Who cares, so long as I can find what I am looking for, and I’m able to tweak my sites to gain in the results for the 1 person who has a clue…

ref: this article

Good grief.

Just after midnight CR is back up and flying straight! The hosting company pulled their heads out of their collective asses just far enough to actually READ the content of the emails I sent explaining what the problem was and low and behold… There were 2 records.

At least at this point things are back and rolling.

/steps off the soap box and quits throwing rocks for a while.

New hosting company for Captive Reefing has already managed to screw things up, not bad only took 12 hours to hose the site up. 2 A records for the hostname each point to different IP addresses, only one of them a valid Apache server configured to serve the domain, 50/50 shot of hitting the site every 14400 seconds = SANFU.

DNS is not that hard to figure out if you take a second to actually LOOK at it, silly tech tells me I’m wrong with I forward results retrieved from their DNS server, but apologizes for the confusion? Who’s confused here, I’ve only been earning a living doing this stuff for over 15 years. Odd that nothing like this happens on MY corporate network, maybe that’s why my mortage is still current huh?

If someone doesn’t pull their head out of their ass and quick I’ll be pulling all my sites off and back onto my own servers and go looking for that 91 day satisfaction garuntee, 3 days after signing up for service, if this is typical service, may not even be a new record for them. Maybe I’m just too demanding and am wrong expecting things to actually work, these crappy automated frontends sure look good on paper, but geez I’ll take the good old CLI and pico anyday over them, hell give me vi and I won’t complain, hell I’ve written more than one website with nothing but vi.

Enough venting, really did get a great deal on the hosting, out of 6 sites I’ve moved, only one is hosed, too bad it was the most important to the most number of people.

Back to hammering at the problem at hand.