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.