Hi everyone. The website’s been down for the last 18 hours, since 7:30 A.M. (EDT) this morning, but I’m back now. I discovered it when I awoke at 2 P.M. (I’m happily unemployed), and immediately began trouble-shooting. It wasn’t on my end at all; it had to be Netfirms’ fault (they’ve given me trouble before). Netfirms wasn’t serving up anything from the MySQL database, which cripples me, because this blog is all dynamic.

Netfirms has been growing progressively worse in the past two weeks… FTP has been terribly slow, the website is slow, it’s gone down a couple of …

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I checked this site about an hour ago and got the error message, no input file specified, with a blank page. I was trouble-shooting the problem, and found that disabling the Netfirms Pretty Permalinks plugin fixed it. I blogged about this in January, as Netfirms wouldn’t support URIs without “/index.php,” without the work-around. Apparently Netfirms fixed this one month ago, but I didn’t have any clashes till now.

Now everything’s fine (it was about twelve hours that pages except the home page were broken). Also, Canonical URIs work now, so …

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Thripp.com was down from 2008-03-04T15:00Z to 2008-03-06T00:00Z. My domain name, hosted by Melbourne IT, runs out on 2008-03-16; they charge $35 to renew, so I got started transferring out. I chose Triple.com because they were running a cheap special ($5.55; a loss for them), but they reset my domain’s name servers even though I said not to.

This is what I set before initiating the transfer on 2008-02-28:

When the transfer finally went through on 2008-03-04:…

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My website was down from 15:00Z to 22:00Z today (10 A.M. to 5 P.M. EST). This was the fault of my host, Netfirms, as they lost power today, and their backup generators failed. More about this here. So, while they claim to host one million websites, for seven hours today, they hosted zero (even their own was down for most of that time).

I get the most traffic on Saturday, so this was quite disappointing for me. I called them and was told I could write to csmgr@netfirms.com, and they may consider compensating me. Here’s what …

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My pages’ URIs don’t have /index.php in them anymore, thanks to this Wordpress plugin (Netfirms Pretty Permalinks). I can’t use canonical URIs because the hack requires them to be disabled. So, just use the links around here when linking to me, as they’re all fine. Looking at the Wordpress forum, I’m glad I can have nice links at all.

I was getting memory errors in the administration panel, but they went away when I disabled MySpace, Facebook, and Xanga cross-posting. 2008-01-04 Update: It was the Google Sitemap Generator; I increased the amount of memory available to …

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Richard's picks:

Hello all! I’m Richard X. Thripp, and 2007-12-23 marks the day of my first entry on my blog at richardxthripp.thripp.com. The reason for the subdomain is so that I may share Thripp.com with friends and family without it being a personal website.

Unfortunately I have crippled hosting through Netfirms, and so all my pages must have “/index.php” in their URIs. When I switch to a better host (I’m locked in through 2008-07), hopefully I’ll be able to redirect all old links to the new pages without “/index.php”. I was able to get advertising set up …

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