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What A Weekend

Anhosting Problems

Oi, what a weekend. After having to cancel my show on Friday evening because of a very sick Lorelle and tornadoes knocking at my door, I discovered on Saturday that I couldn’t access my very own blog nor could I access my email. During the day, I noticed that other people were able to browse my domain. In fact, it looked as though everyone EXCEPT me could browse my domain. After submitting a support ticket to AnHosting, I went through the run of the mill trouble shooting process. At one point, they told me it looked like my public IP address had been blocked by their firewall. After giving them my IP address and having it removed, the problem remained.

Sunday rolls around and my problem is yet to be resolved. On a whim, I decided to contact the LIVE web chat that AnHosting provides. After talking to a representative for awhile, I was told which server my account was on and that I was not the only one having problems. Apparently, AnHosting’s upstream provider was having a routing issue which was causing some clients not to be able to connect to the site at all while others were able to access the domain.

Monday afternoon comes around and the problem still exists. At this point, I’ve gone three days with no access to my inbox. Not having access to my inbox for three days really reminded me just how much I rely on email for communication, perhaps a little too much. Thank goodness for Twitter though as I used that to keep everyone up to date as to what was going on. I also used Twitters Direct Messaging feature to keep in touch with people.

It’s 3 P.M. Monday afternoon and I post a message to Twitter explaining how upset I am at the thought of having an inbox with 100 emails. As it turns out, not 5 minutes later did access to my inbox and my domain return.

So there you have it, thats why you might of come across the blog and noticed I was gone when in fact, everyone except me could browse the site. This has been the first major problem I’ve had with AnHosting so I’m not all that upset. In fact, this really reminds me that even though the internet is a chain, when one of those chain links break, it can affect everyone from that link on back and brings the question into mind, just how reliable is the internet as a whole? At any rate, I was pretty pleased with the support I received from the folks at AnHosting and I still recommend them to anyone who is looking for a good quality, reliable webhost.

On a very unrelated note, I went to go see a movie called Leatherheads starring George Clooney with my girlfriend Monday evening. If you’re into old time flicks mixed with a bit of comedy, I recommend checking this one out for yourself.

A romantic comedy set in the world of 1920s football, where the owner of a professional team drafts a strait-laced college sensation, only to watch his new coach fall for his fiancée.

My WordPress 2.3 Upgrade Experience

I’m writing this post within the new fancy WYSIWYG editor which is nothing more than the same editor with the exception of a new button. The new button shows me quite a few new formatting features but my favorite one is the UNDO button.

So far, my WordPress upgrade experience has been pretty good. I did encounter an upload problem in which a few folders were uploaded into other folders. In other words, some folders were not overwritten like they were supposed to be. I fixed this and re-uploaded the files which allowed the WordPress upgrade script to properly update my database.

I believe there is a bug that was created after my WordPress installation was upgraded. As you can see below, the area of my dashboard which would normally show incoming links to my site from outside sources, is now showing my own blog posts from my front page. I’m pretty sure this is not supposed to happen. This never occurred during any other WP upgrade I have performed. I have since created a forum post about it on the official WP forums to see if it’s a bug or not.

WordPRess 2.3 Bug

I knew about the tag importers being added to WordPress 2.3 but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out where they were. I eventually located them within the MANAGE-IMPORT area of my WordPress admin panel. After clicking on the importer for my Ultimate Tagging Warrior plugin, all of my tags were imported into the native tagging features implemented into WP 2.3 I also experienced numerous wordpress.wp_post2cat does not exist errors which were being generated by the UTW plugin, so be sure to disable it once you complete your upgrade.

I want to give a very big thank you to everyone responsible for the automatic update notification feature. This is an invaluable time saver. After my upgrade was complete, I discovered 5 plugins which had an update available for download. The notification window provides a direct link to the plugin on the wordpress.org site where additional information along with the plugin files can be located.

Last but not least, if you are experiencing trouble with WordPress, the best place to find help is the WordPress.org forums. However, before creating a new post, be sure to perform a search to see if your question was already answered. There is nothing more annoying on a forum than seeing 50 different forum threads on the same topic which has already been answered.

You’ve read my experience, now it’s time to share yours by leaving a comment below.