Rubénerd Blog :)

For those of you subscribed to my blog through an aggregator using the old URL for the RSS feed instead of the new one, you may have noticed four recent posts with identical timestamps. You probably don’t care why this happened, but I’m so excited I just have to relay it!

When I moved from Servage to Segment Publishing because the former was absolutely awful and because I had so much success with the latter for other projects, I also took the opportunity to move the site back to Rubenerd.com which I had previously lost to domain squatters. RubenerdShow.com was still with Servage, but all it contained was a simple .htaccess script to redirect all requests to the new domain.

Well as of today, I finally got around to moving the domain off Servage and onto Segment Publishing including said text file. This means, FINALLY, I am completely, 110% off Servage. I don’t have anything hosted with them whatsoever. Clear as mud!

I’m putting the finishing touches on my post detailing what an awful webhost Servage is but it won’t be ready for a few days. Another post I’m positive you’re all anxiously awaiting ;-).

The flustered rent and webhost episode!

Fun with dealing with broken corrupt backups, misleadingly labelled auto rent payments and my former webhost Servage now that I’m safely typing this from Segment Publishing!

Am particularly flustered and fast talking which saves on file download times for your convenience. Thank you.

Download MP3 to listen 20:55 9.7MiB

You can also view previous episodes, subscribe via iTunes or another client, stream this episode and view its Internet Archive page.

As some of you would no doubt remember, with my previous webhost Servage it was quite normal for the database or web server backing this blog to go offline for anywhere between several hours to several days. For those who have only just stumbled upon my bizarre mix of whatnot here, I’m not exaggerating with those downtime figures!

My new webhost sent me this message this afternoon:

Dear Ruben,

On Sunday 19th April 2009 we will be performing scheduled maintenance on our shared hosting servers. The maintenance will be starting at 3:00PM and finishing at 5:00PM (GMT+10).

We expect minimal downtime, however you may notice your website unavailable for a period of 2-3 minutes during this time. No email will be affected, only your website.

Best Regards,
Segment Publishing Customer Support

You read that right… 2-3 minutes. My old webhost would have blamed an outage of 2-3 minutes on the fact I sneezed and subsequently closed my eyes for the duration of that time. Or worse still, they would have claimed it was the result of me setting my permissions wrong. That was their answer to everything. Hehe, sneeze.

Earlier today I talked about how the best way to treat an online visitor or customer is the same as with any other industry: with respect. I guess having lived without it for so long online, now having it feels weird.

I’m forming a theory that FreeBSD people not only have a better server OS than others, but that they’re cooler too. SegPub is a FreeBSD webhost… perhaps I’m onto something. Or perhaps I’m just on something. I wish I were witty, then I’d have wit.

For those of you following my adventures with the WordPress WXR/RSS export feature (here, here, here and here), I finally figured out why the resulting file was truncated and only contained posts up to October last year. It’s so simple I’m kicking myself for not figuring it out sooner: PHP on my webhost was configured to only allow a maximum file size of 4MiB.

As I’ve said before I’m not a PHP guy so I had to do a bit of digging, but it turns out the most reliable way to increase allowed file sizes if you don’t have access to your php.ini file (usually this is the case) is to add the following line to your root .htaccess file:

php_value memory_limit 32M

You might have to do some trial and error to find a size value that works. If in doubt, contact your webhost.

I think the people at WordPress ought to include a simple warning on the Export page of people’s blogs informing them of the file size limitation on their web servers, or barring that issue an error if it runs out of space with a link to a page explaining how to increase available file sizes instead of cheerfully and misleadingly informing users the export is finished. I imagine there are plenty of people who’ve been caught out by this, some of whom I’m sure aren’t web developers and wouldn’t know where to even start looking to solve this.

Another day, another person hotkinking images I have hosted on my server here. As I’ve said before I’ll often include images from other sources on the net in my own blog posts, but I’ll always upload the images to my own server instead so I’m not wasting their bandwidth… I figure it’s just common courtesy.

Well as of today the writers at the above linked blog silently uploaded their own copy of the hotlinked image and changed the URL when I submitted a comment.

You do know hotlinking is a sign of the devil right? You’re not possessed are you? ;)

Perhaps that’s the key to tackling this problem; instead of sending polite emails that get ignored or at the other extreme blocking all outside requests to images, I should just leave friendly comments on offenders sites! Might not work every time, but it’s worth a shot ^_^.

In the meantime they’ve made up for it with their review of Religulous. I thought it was much better than they did apparently, but they do raise good points. But that’s a topic for another show or post. I’m not Bill Kurtis.

The street sweeper webhost perfect storm episode!

The issue that everyone is thinking about: motorised street sweepers. Also discussing Twitter password adventures; internet obsessions when asleep; transit stops in Bali; code injection attacks; file permissions giving permission; domain adventures; the Googles refusing indexing; Ourmedia; the Internet Archive; Harvie Krumpet’s backyard (not to be confused with Burke’s backyard; Starbucks Christmas blend; NesCafe; the ill fated Viennese Coffee House; the Boatdeck Cafe; throwing bottles at people’s faces and midlife crisis coffee roasting machines!

Download MP3 to listen ↓ 21:03 9.8MiB

You can also stream this episode and view its Internet Archive page.