I found a wonderful Perl script to back up the databases behind my sites every night over at WorldCommunity.com. It’s been faithfully mailing me the files every night for a week now: I had been wondering what I was going to do with all that Google Apps mail space. :-)

When checking my email today, I saw that Dreamhost had billed my account for a year of hosting. Only problem was, my account didn’t expire until November.

Once I finally fought my way onto their site, I found that 11/12th of their customers were also trying to get there, as somebody had typoed the year while running their highly-reliable billing program.

I have removed my debit card info from their system: if the bank had actually put the charge through, which they somehow missed doing (?), I would have been in a fair world of hurt, as I live paycheck to paycheck. They are apologizing profusely — I’m waiting to see what they do to remedy things for people who miss mortgage payments and suchlike stuff because of this. I love the service I’ve been getting from them, but this is much more than a “whoops” moment.

Edit: I didn’t really express before what I thought of their professionalism in handling this. They didn’t hide behind “somebody screwed up” — the person who made the mistake came out and explained in detail how he came to that point. He also explained how they were going to change things so that it didn’t happen again, and managed to retain his sense of humor throughout. What other company would have quoted the line from their previous blog post about “we have new digs, so if you see your hosting bill mysteriously triple…”? Many commenters complained about the humorous pictures and the jokes: in retrospect (though not while I was in a financial panic), I think that’s an indication of more professionalism, not less.

Compare this to the typical response from Microsoft, for example. When M$ screws up, how long does it take them to admit it? And then to fix it? Admittedly, this isn’t fixed yet, but my account was credited back within about 12 hours.

It turned out that Sitemeter had “partnered” with another company to put tracking cookies on sites using their counter. Since that wasn’t part of the deal when I signed up with them, I’ll be using something else in the future.

One of the things I was looking forward to when moving webhosts was Apache’s mod_rewrite module, which just allowed me to flip from using URLs with the post number in them to ones with the date and post title in them. Much more convenient. :-)

So far, everything’s been pretty smooth. I’m currently working on switching my main site from FrontPage to Drupal. I found a nice theme for it: I just have to finish moving the content over, and cleaning up non-working code. :-)

I’ve moved my web hosting over to Dreamhost. It was time to renew my hosting, and I decided that I should switch over to an Apache-based host, where all the software I’ve been trying to use will work properly. :-)

As usual, not everything is going smoothly, so we’ll just have to wait and see what happens — preferably before WebHost4Life cuts me off. :-)

My blog was MIA for the past day because of a bad upgrade to the bleeding-edge code running it. I don’t mean that the code was bad, just that something I did with it was messed up. I just deleted everything except my customizations and pictures, and re-uploaded the current revision: it worked fine.

Unfortunately, I now have 170 moderated comments to clean up. Yuck. I’m surprised that people were able to send comments through without any actual front end…

I just replaced the “Warped” theme’s comment.php with the one from the default theme, which should give me back the login functionality on comments. Anybody want to give it a shot and let me know if it works for you too?

Just downloaded a theme that was more like my old layout. I should be able to tweak this into compliance fairly easily…

I changed them to be the default post id, which always works. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to get Pretty Permalinks to play nicely with my web host.

Anybody out there really happy with the level of control and service that their web host gives them? (Shell access would be nice…)

P.S. — Tamar, thanks for the nudge to fix this.

As you can probably tell from a quick glance, I’m not on Blogger anymore. Or rather, I am, but I’ll be working with WordPress going forward. One of the big reasons I moved off Blogspot was to have the freedom to tinker: well, it took me a few years, but I finally got here. :-)