Said the man with the broken mind.

Wanting the flexibility of hosting your blog on your own space is such a faff.  I’ve not really had the inclination to blog recently because my site is totally in a state of flux.

The peeps who are currently hosting this are a bunch of jokers and it really is one thing after another.  Not long after recovering from my blog being completely inaccessible one of my 2 domains with them was due to expire.

Itchmerry.com is actually parked (is that the word?) as a subdomain of scissordesign.com, which I never used but was the first of the 2 domains for me to register and as such is the boss of the shared space I pay for.

Now, I received an auto generated email from them telling informing me that scissordesign.com was due to expire next month and that I should send them a cheque for 0.00GBP.  Obviously I needed to question such a strange amount to be invoiced for… I certainly wasn’t going to waste a page of my chequebook for zero pounds and zero pence, although it would probably have been good for a laugh.  So I emailed them and was given a reply saying the email was no longer in use and I should submit a ticket on a new support site they’ve set up.  So I did that, only for the following page to spool off a load of php errors, the sites mail server wasn’t set up properly.  So not only did I not receive any confirmation but I doubt the bunch of jokers running it received anything either.

Suffice it to say, I never heard back and the domain went and expired.

Although itchmerry.com is still accessible it is a problem because some apps, notably a lot of blog readers store the URL that itchmerry.com/feed/atom resolves to, which is itchmerry.scissordesign.com/feed/atom.  And this now fails.

So basically no one is going to be reading this, which is the sux0rz.

I’ve decided to sign up with bluehosts.  I’ve chosen them because they have paid advertising on wordpress.org’s list of compliant hosts.  So I figure that should protect me from any future wordpress issues, such as them deciding to block it or whatever…  Plus they charge a fair bit more than my current hosts and I’m hoping you get what you pay for.

They do the domain transfer for you, but i’m wondering how successful they will be considering the jokers who currently have my domain are MIA.  I hope that if they don’t manage to transfer it, they will refund me?

Even still, once I have this all migrated to the new hosts, the domain setup with be different. itchmerry.com will be the primary domain, so a lot of you (not that there is a lot of you anyway) will have to re-subscribe to the feed.  It’s my fault for not using feedburner I suppose.

Sorry.  Ugh. Still, hopefully the new setup will spur me on to keep up the blogging more.  When that happens…

Wanted to upload a song for my podcast (that no one listens to) today but it seems my site is still not quite fixed.

I cannot access it’s ftp service, just get “connection refused” the most arrogant of all error codes.  Also I don’t think email is working ‘cos I haven’t received any from the wordpress install for ages.

I can’t use wordpresses upload file because they have too strict a filesize limit in their php install.  Hmmm, wonder if you override that on a folder basis like some kind of php equivalent to a htaccess file.

Even better, whenever I email them at the moment I get an auto-response back saying that the email address is no longer used, but doesn’t provide an alternative.  And i’m using the support email listed on their website. Fun.

Ugh, my site is up and down like a yo-yo.  No sooner had I posted that the site’s hosts were hacked then some other unknown reason kicked itchmerry off the web again.

Maybe if I don’t post at all it might stay up?

Haha, I’ve had such a rollercoaster ride over the years with this cheap-ass hosting i get (dunno why I don’t want to mention their name?) that i think i must have an incy bit of affection for them.  I cannot think of any other reason why I might still be with them.

The latest chapter, last week they were hacked, and the hacker went a routin and a tootin through their servers deleting what not.  As always the backup they’ve restored from is older than it ought to be, haven’t lost any entries but there was the odd comment made since it was done, so they’ve been lost, sorry.

I’d feel really mean and kinda guilty if I emailed them asking to release my domain, or point it to another nameserver and by the way don’t renew my account… or maybe that’s my problem in a nutshell.  Not being assertive enough?

My therapy homework for this week is to spend 5 minutes per day browsing a small store (not a large supermarket). Bet that sounds ridiculous.

I’m not sure I understand Open ID anymore. I had come to know of it as a protocol (in effect) allowing you to identify yourself via your closest, or most prized internet presence. So you can identify yourself via your blog. For instance I have an openid server plugin installed on my wordpress blog, so whenever I see a site which accepts an OpenID login, I simply point to my own blog and because I’m already logged in to my blog via a cookie, most of the time I won’t even have to issue a password. But now it seems that openid identities are being created by people outside of their primary internet presence, using public openid servers. I dunno, but this just seems to miss the point. Or maybe I never knew the point.

The calendar flicked over t0 march today meaning that virgin media’s carriage rights for sky’s standard channels expired.  It’s pretty funny, the channel number for sky one has been hijacked and replaced by a Virgin branded VOD commercial.  Another, Sky News has been replaced by a hillarious pun, the channel is now called “Old Sky Snooze” and is a static message spooling off that same memo signed by richard branson.

It’s all so odd.  It was only a week or so ago that are Telly was still just Telewest and it was all so friendly and inoffensive.

Trying out some clipping service called <a href=”http://www.clipmarks.com/”>clipmarks</a>. Wonder how it will look when blogging a clip.

clipped from www.itchmerry.com Written in Buzz with nothing more than my fingers this stark plodder has some bleeps and bendy bleeps and what seems like a particulary untalented drummer in the room.� It’s from 1999. Cash & Mouse

Update: Well hmm, way too much branding going on there for my taste. And it escaped my markup. The cheek.

Jotspot looks great, it’s a free, easy to use wiki but it goes futher than just wiki html pages. It also has wiki spreadsheets and wiki calendars.  Tons of stuff perfect for collobrating and managing projects for almost anything imaginable.  Unfortunately, despite the gloss there are fundimental problems.  It doesn’t work at all well with Safari, it looks fine until you try to do things, for instance you create a spreadsheet and discover you can’t click on any cells, or you create a wiki page and it tells you the browser doesn’t support WYSIWYG.  It’s a shame and surely an online collaborative tool relies on being truely cross platform.   I wonder if there are any OSS PHP etc wiki systems with this many features you can install yourself on a server.  PHPWiki IMO is ropey at best and only does pages.

Introducing All New Itch and be Merry

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Widescreen. Optimised for state of the art wide 16:10 displays Itch and be Merry now packs more information on your screen with room to breath. Complex rasterising allows for per pixel detail never before seen on a web site.

Wide Colour Gamut. Itch and be Merry has a more dynamic use of colour, utilising powerful colour profilling technology to deliverer richer, eye popping graphics.

More Lists! Now implimenting more listmania features, including the best LP’s of the year so far on every page.

The art of Tagging. Easy access to the most commonly used tags on every page right where you need it.

Available now!

Cheap-AssTM Hosting are still having intermittent problems.  I dunno what happened this time but my site was down for 2 days.  I couldn’t reach it at all for one day, neither my site nor Cheap-AssTM’s website.  But when the rest of Cheap-AssTM came back online, and also some sites of people who I know use them.  But my site served up some juicy 404’s and I couldn’t connect to its FTP.  Weird.

CPanel is still all screwed up.  Ah well.

I’ve been doing more tweaking with my WP installation, i now have OpenID support back and fixed some styling issues. BTW, do you like my new tag cloud? It’s funky.

Unlike Movable Type, Wordpress doesn’t have a system whereby entries are published to static files, every page is php, including all the index’s and archives so every time the service dishes out a page it’s having to render it. This is my biggest concern, generally my site does feel a little slower, but not so slow that i’d be overly bothered. It’s just if the shared server starts getting bogged down in php it’s surely going to suffer.

On the plus side having all pages dynamic and in a language I familiar with is surely got some potential for reeking havoc.

Something worth noting, wordpress’s “write post” page uses a rich text control of some sort to provide a partial WYSIWYG solution, unfortunately it doesn’t work on Safari, but it does work in gecko based browsers.

The battery recall discussion on MacInTouch is interesting. Seem’s i’m far from the only person who had problems getting the serial code to validate, the consensus is that it’s due to the website being overworked, which in that case isn’t very good from Apple at all because surely it should display an Error, and not a message making out the serial was to fault. They’ve also amended the affected range of battery serials as well, so if yours wasn’t one of the baddens when you first checked it might be an idea to have another quick look-see.