The Fractal Hall Journal

The pause in blogging really wasn’t meant to be this long. Talk about things getting away from you. Better update next week, promise.

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Computer trouble, ineffective excuses, etc., etc.

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Hi folks.

Sorry for the sudden disappearance again. A few issues between my current hosting company and the old one. Things may get a little rocky with the site this week, but hopefully just for a short while.

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And so disappearing for a short while to recharge the old blogging batteries.

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First things first: By complete coincidence, this is both the first post back on the regular schedule and the the Journal’s 300th entry.

I’ve been with the Hall’s old hosting service for as long as there’s been a version of the Journal, which must be at least four years. Back in the old, pre-blog days, it was just a collection of various HTML pages with hardly any visitors. I was paying for one of those ‘unlimited’ shared-server packages that aren’t really unlimited, but I never really had a problem.

You know how sometimes, with technology in particular, you get the odd blips and errors that you kind of dismiss as not being that big a problem? The things you end up just getting by with? Well, I used to get loads of those. There’s be database errors now and then, posts going missing, things failing to load. Because I’ve never used another hosting company, and wasn’t that familiar with Wordpress, I just assumed it was an Internet Thing. Turns out it wasn’t.

After the spike in traffic from the Delineation posts, the Journal’s back-end started getting less and less predictable, until I could only get access maybe once in every dozen attempts. At first I thought it was the new blog template, but switching it off didn’t make a difference. I asked the hosting company what was going on, but after being perfectly fine for years they suddenly got absolutely useless.

I lost a bit of enthusiasm for, well, everything round about this point. I don’t mind working my way round technical issues when I’ve got time and patience to deal with it, but both resources happened to get a bit scarce as they sometimes do. I knew I’d have to switch providers, but I really didn’t want to just end up with the same problems somewhere else.

As it is, things have been way better since making the switch. It’s early days, but things have been rock solid over the past week. None of the old big problems, but also none of the loading time issues and small glitches that I just used to work around. I’m cautiously optimistic about things, and there’s a decent enough money-back guarantee on the hosting that means I can afford a little time to make sure I’m not going to have to deal with another Incident for a while.

Since the weekend, you may have noticed the Journal’s new new look. The old new look got the boot because (a) while it didn’t cause the problem, I figure it’s not worth the risk, (b) I got sick of looking at it during all the trouble and (c) apart from anything else, I’m not sure how legible the colour scheme was. So we’ll give this new one a go. And before we go any further, I just want to note that I was very fond of the old old template, based on Razvan Teodorescu’s fantastic ‘Falling Dreams’ theme. But it was time for a change, and this time I’m using one based on the Wired Studios theme, as stolen from seen at MightyGodKing. I’ll probably keep tinkering with the template over the next week or so, and hopefully all the internal links and missing images will be fixed by Christmas.

The old permalinks have been a casualty of the move. The numbering got changed during transfer, meaning that any pre-existing links to individual pages or posts are either going to the wrong place or not going anywhere at all. I’m in the middle of fixing the Journal’s internal links (and if anyone comes across any broken ones, please drop me a comment or an email to let me know), but I’m afraid a whole lot of broken links have been created off-site. The good news is that it gives me an excuse to change the permalink system from numbers-based to date-and-name-based. I’m told that this makes the page friendlier to search engines. Every cloud, eh?

Erm, what else? Oh yes. After a fair few weeks of downtime, you’d think I would have kept on writing, building up a buffer of posts. But no. I have, instead, been using my time to catch up on series 3 and 4 of Prison Break. The time off has made me think about the best way of keeping a schedule, though. I’ll probably start doing long posts on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and shorter ones on Tuesday and Thursday.

Ans speaking of Tuesdays and Thursdays, Brother Paul and I have been working on a new project that will let us play with our toys both amuse and entertain you all. I’ll let you know more about it in future weeks.

Finally, sincere thanks from Management for your patience. It’s been a frustrating few weeks, but it’s good to be getting back to normal.

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Still a few issues and a lot of housekeeping to do, but apart from that the Journal’s transition to new hosting is a success. Fingers crossed, but we shouldn’t be disappearing again, things should be faster, and you should now be able to comment once more.

In the short term: Pages and posts have been renamed in the transition, so any previous links probably won’t work anymore. Sigh. Sincere apologies to everyone with broken links now leading off their pages.

There are a fair few internal links that don’t work at the moment (Archive and About, for example), but should be straightforward to fix over the next few days. I think all the images came across ok, but I’m not sure.

Still tinkering with a new blog template, after the last one kicked off all the trouble, so expect the Journal’s appearance to change radically over the weekend.

And finally, everything should be back to the semblance of a regular schedule by Monday. Hurrah!

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It’s early days, but it looks like we’ve survived the provider change largely intact, though we lost a couple of the most recent comments (sorry, friend plok!).

A couple more days to sort things out, and we may well be able to get on with our trademark earnest over-analysis! And just in time for Christmas, too.

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…The site is likely to be even less stable for while.

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The short version:

Regarding the recent connection problems, my hosting provider has, politely, said tough shit. And intends to charge me twice as much next year.

Looks like the move is now unavoidable. I’ll let you all know more when I do.

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Chum Plok has let me know that there are problems with the Hall’s commenting system, which is inevitably a symptom of all the other database problems. I hope no-one’s lost anything particularly lengthy.

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