Life and Blogging is Hard

Plus.net have moved to the new CGI platform after some sort of disaster. As this was coming for almost a year, I’m shocked that the platform still seems in such a shoddy state.

This has meant that the site has been misbehaving for a few weeks. Most notably causing random Apache errors.

I think that it’s a wake up call to me that I need to get this blog living somewhere else. Letting it expand and breathe as it needs to.

Some of the way to that is getting a new hosting plan sorted out. I wanted to do this in an el-cheapo style by using SQLite instead of mySQL to power WordPress, but it seems like the database abstraction that it uses might as well be non-existant. mySQL or bust I’m afraid.

In a time when PHP provides a unified access library, and many frameworks have a respectable set of DB abstraction libraries – it’s frustrating to see the WordPress team get suckered into making new features the top of the development priority list, while failing to solidify or revisit programming fundamentals.

And what’s the point of having plugins at all if they don’t get approved in any way? After my trial with SQLite, I’m genuinely worried about any WP plugins now.

Moving soon folks!

Thankyou, Plus.net

Well, it seems that I have to give Plus.net a big thumbs-up on what could have easily been a crisis.

At 2008-01-18 08:57:02 this was posted on their support site:

We have recently become aware of a number of PlusNet customers who are experiencing problems receiving email following the migration of their accounts to the new Postini anti-spam platform.

Email sent to customers accounts may be returned to the sender as undeliverable with the following server response:

554 No relaying allowed

Our engineers are investigating and further details will be provided as they become available.

Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience.

Kind Regards,

Bob Pullen
Customer Support.

I was one of the lucky bods who was affected. So my website was down for a day… It only has nonsense anyway. This blog was still up so I wasn’t worried. What the great part was is that they restored all of the sites from backup, so by the time I woke up the next day, everything was working exactly as the day before.

Once again, the Plus.net people don’t let me down. It’s nice to see them back on form.