It seems since I upgraded the blog to Wordpress v2.5 over the weekend, that some of you are having issues logging in. (Some are having issues and others are not having any problems at all.) If you have your password e-mailed to you automatically and that does not help, you can contact me using the e-mail account you signed up with and I’ll try and reset your password manually.

The SPAM is just becoming a pain to deal with. I’ve been having to turn off accepting trackbacks/pingbacks for political posts for a while, because of all the bot SPAM, but now it’s happening with other non-political related posts too.

So if you blog about a post here and want us to know about your additional thoughts on a given post, just leave a comment with a link to your posts that can be read for more details.

Yea I’ve got plenty of defenses against SPAM, but some of the new fake blogs that send trackbacks have become an annoyance and there are rumblings all over the blogsphere of just dumping the concept of trackbacks/pingbacks completely.

I could thank lots of blogs for linking to material here, but one I’ve never openly thanked that deserves thanks is Blue Collar Republican, who links to much of the material here, sometimes almost daily. Perhaps that blog will become “Blue Collar Independent” one day .

Since early 1/18/2008, this blog has been receiving distributed denial of service attacks aimed at the receiving e-mail system. To thwart the desired impact of that style of attack (someone hopes to crash the blog’s server) no messages sent via this blog’s contact page have been received, since early 1/18/2008. The contact page now works properly again. If you’ve been trying to reach me using this blog’s contact e-mail address, which a VERY limited number of you reading this know about, do not use that e-mail account. Use the contact form. Mail sent to that e-mail account will not be received. Messages sent to me via the contact form should reach me with no problem now.

So earlier today, my now former web hosting company (AN Hosting aka MPhase.com) shut my blog down. They said I was using too much “CPU”. Now here’s the game, these web site hosting companies promise a boat load of bandwidth and with that inherently computer resources are used, including CPU. What they don’t say is that while they give you lots of bandwidth, they know other resources will be used beyond limits they never tell you about. So I was getting a little traffic and of course CPU usage went up and suddenly they wanted to shut my account down and suggested I “upgrade” (give them more money). Well why would I do that, when with a prior web host I’ve seen 5 times today’s level of traffic with no complaints? That was before I moved to (AN Hosting aka MPhase.com) from another web host I used to use.

But when they shut me down I tried to be nice. I said, “well let me try and shut off some things that might save on CPU usage”. They let me back in and while in the middle of trying to do some things to “conserve CPU” my site died again. With the same “suspended” message. The tech support at (AN Hosting aka MPhase.com) claimed they didn’t shut it down again, but when it came back for a 2nd time MY BLOG’S DATABASE WAS GONE! (Blog owners, do nightly backups, that’s all I can tell you.) Well the tech support at (AN Hosting aka MPhase.com) was nice enough to get my database back without a thing lost. I have a backup, but it was missing a day and a half of material, so it was best that I get the most current backup, so nothing would be lost.

When I noticed my database was gone, I was pretty disappointed with (AN Hosting aka MPhase.com). As I said, their tech people don’t claim to know what happened once they removed the “suspension” from my account the first time and don’t claim they did anything to cause my blog’s database to disappear or the blog to be “suspended” a 2nd time. After turning it on the first time, when I started complaining my account was suspended again, they were like (paraphrasing) “oh everything is fine…” .

Anyway, I felt it was time to find a new web host immediately. The blog has been moved to another web host and things seem cool so far.

Thank the Lord for all and the blog was not even down an entire day.

For all of you wondering about Melvin’s blog, he’s been working on switching servers, because of issues with hackers. (There has been no shortage of people asking me what’s up.)

His blog will be back online…sometime, can’t say exactly when, but he’s working on it.

He is personally doing well, no pimp took him off in a black van. Nothing to worry about folks .
Just pray the Lord grants him wisdom regarding who host his blog. (Melvin I told you I could not resist mentioning it .)

It seems with some videos I’ve posted, some people said the videos were not working. I’ve discovered that the issue is that some of you are probably using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser . So videos I embed from Google don’t appear for you on the page, like in this post for example. I use Firefox and so I didn’t do one of my checks with IE for a while and had no clue about the issue. So for all videos I have on this blog from Google, I’ve added a direct link to the video under where the video is embedded. So if you don’t see the video, just click the link.

Also, because we know some people try and have things removed, it’s good to download copies of videos yourself to keep. There are many good ways to download videos from the various sites that host video content.

• RealPlayer has a means to download videos easily directly from your web browser. Their free player can do it.
• Replay Media Catcher is an excellent tool, although you have to pay a small fee for it.
• If you’ve previously viewed a YouTube video, that may have been removed, it may still be in your browser’s cache. This site can help you get the video if you know the old YouTube URL, it even works if the video is still up on YouTube.

There are probably other good ways to download videos, that I don’t even know about. I’m sure you who know of other good methods will mention them in the comments for the benefit of everyone .

Wow, there was a bug in my template (blog theme) code, that had been there for a long time without causing any issues. But I did an upgrade to the blog software the other night, that caused the bug to affect anyone’s ability to leave a comment.

I’ve fixed the problem. All should work fine now.

Note to bloggers:
Also, I’ve noticed that after the upgrade (to WP 2.3) the Inline Trackback feature has a bug. That’s an old plugin, so I’ve dumped it. Your trackbacks will be in the list of comments like all other blogs, but no longer will they display as a link in the actual blog post. The blog Trackback Policy has been updated because of this change.

If you’ve tried to post a comment recently you noticed it did not post. This is a problem I’m working to resolve. Another post will be made once it is fixed.

Well the transfer didn’t go too bad. Way smoother than it could have been.

Some of you might not have seen the blog for a few hours, others may not have ever seen it down at all. In all Praise the Lord.

I will note, that this move was in part because my former web host - named Bluehost - just seemed to give far too many indications that they were run by Mormons. And given my heavy criticism of the cult of Joseph Smith Junior, I figured it would be best to make a move. The former host is based out of Utah, which is of course the state of Mormonism, but I never thought much about it. Then one day I was reading the blog of the top man at that former host and found a blog entry that eluded to too many things that reek of Mormonism, although he never actually said he is part of that bunch. Someone asked in the comments if he is Mormon and he never responded, which only further made me think he is and was trying to be covert about it.

So when the top man at your web host is probably into something you’re totally speaking against on a regular basis, it’s probably best to make a move before some unexpected problems just start out of the blue. Plus if I can stop one dollar from going towards that cult the move was worth it.

And the new host offers more for less .

Not that I know the full background of every company I ever have to deal with, including my new web host. However, the more I learned about the former the more I knew it was time to go.

All the blog upgrades were in part to help in my moving things to a new web host. I’ve been wanting to do the upgrades and the move provided added incentive to get that done. So as of now the move is in process. I’m trying to do the move in a way that won’t cause the blog to be “down” for any time, Lord willing my idea works . However, during the cut over there is a high probability, that any comments added or new user registrations made during this period, while things are on the old web host, will be lost.

So it would be best to hold off on any comments till I make a new post noting that the move is complete.

Might take a day, might take a few days. I just jump in and see how it goes .