Category: Blogging

Aloha Friday: Changing Your Host

Aloha Friday, Blogging, Web Development

You may have noticed that TechyDad.com and TheAngelForever.com were down for quite a bit both this week and last week.  Unfortunately, our web host, Arvixe, has had some severe issues with their servers.  While I don’t doubt that they were working hard to get our web sites back up and running, having 67.5 hours of downtime in 2 weeks makes one think about other hosting options.

We haven’t decided to move just yet.  Even if we did, our hosting requirements are just specific enough to severely limit which hosts we can go with.  Since we use WordPress for our blogs, we obviously need PHP and mySQL.  However, I still like programming in classic ASP, so I need that.  This means a Windows host.  In addition, I need to be able to schedule tasks.  I’ve looked at a few options but so far haven’t come to a conclusion as to what we’ll do next.  (Besides making sure we have up to date backups.)

My questions for you are three-fold:

1) Do you backup your website regularly in case your current host goes belly-up?

2) Would the amount of downtime we’ve had make you rethink where you host your websites?

3) Where do you host your websites now?

 

 

 

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha Friday by Kailani at An Island Life

Aloha #30

Illness-Related Blog Draught

Blogging, Health, JSL, Videos

I’ve been going through a bit of a blogging drought lately and it’s all JSL’s fault.  You see, he’s been sick recently.  101 fevers and screaming that his hair/head/ears hurt.  It makes it hard to blog when you’re worried about your little one.  And if he’s bunking in your bed, waking you up every so many hours, well the exhaustion that sets in doesn’t help.

Luckily, though, JSL has had some happy moments in between sickly complaining.  For example, last night I was sitting in bed trying to get him to sleep.  JSL saw my Twitter Feed and saw a tweet from ThinkGeek. Since ThinkGeek’s mascot (and Twitter icon) is Timmy the Monkey, JSL shouted "Da Da, look! Ooh ooh ahh ahh on Da Da’s computer!"  I told him that was ThinkGeek and we got him to say it.  I neglected to get it on video, but I just rectified this mistake.

[flv]/2010/03/0304001417_ThinkGeek.flv|320|240[/flv]

Yes, he’s my little Geek-In-Training!  And hopefully, JSL-Geek-In-Training will get better soon.  Meanwhile, I’ll work on posts bit by bit.  They’ll just come out slower than I’d hoped.

Happy Blogoversary To Me!

Blogging, TechyDad.com

Today marks one year since I started blogging at TechyDad.com. So much has happened during that time. I’ve travelled to Charleston, South Carolina to see my best friend since Junior High School get married. I’ve vacationed with my family (and in-laws) in Walt Disney World for a week. (I still plan on finishing that series of posts up.)

I’ve had high moments (celebrating my 8th wedding anniversary) and low moments (An extremely scary weekend; Jacob’s febrile seizure where we thought he was choking to death). I’ve cooked a bit, taken TONS of photographs, and found interesting freeware. We’ve seen dinosaurs come alive at Walking with Dinosaurs then had JSL *become* a dinosaur! Meanwhile, NHL was nearly eaten by one as we went indoor mini-golfing.

I’ve posted about copyright, censorship, and working out. We confronted behavior issues with NHL, identified Singulair as the cause, and celebrated the return of the son we knew and loved.

In short, a lot has happened in just one short year. I can’t wait to see what the next year brings! To celebrate, TechyDad.com has a brand new look. I hope you like it and stick with me as the adventure continues in the coming year!

Happy Blogoversary To Me!

Freeware Review: Quoth the Raven, Blog It More!

Blogging, Freeware, Review

I’ll admit that, as much as I love blogging, part of me hated writing blog posts. It was filled with annoyances. First I had to go into WordPress’ admin panel. For some reason, I’d always wind up logged out, so I’d have to load up PasswordSafe to retrieve my password and log in. Once in, I’d have to navigate to the New Post page. When I was there, I’d need to type in my post, remembering to hit Save every so often lest my browser crash and I lose it all. (Somehow, auto-save never works when you need it to.) When I wanted to put images in my post, I had to upload them then add them to my blog using a variety of tactics.

All of these little annoyances meant that it was hard to write a blog post. At least harder than it should have been. All I wanted was a local version of WordPress’ admin panel (so I wouldn’t need to log in) with more of an application’s feel to it. After some Google searching, I found Zoundry Raven. Zoundry Raven gives you a local copy of your blog to work on. It uploads changes (posts, photos, etc) via XML-RPC. What this means is that you load up Raven, select a blog post (or create a new one), add images via dragging and dropping and then hit Publish to send it all to your blog. No messing around with a separate FTP tool. No stopping writing to upload some files.

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One Year Blog-o-versary coming up. What to do?

Blogging, TechyDad.com

In three weeks, I’ll celebrate one whole year of blogging at TechyDad.com. So much has happened since I first launched this blog. I attended my best friend’s wedding, JSL had two trips to the hospital, my grandmother passed away, JSL turned 2 (wow, I thought I blogged about that – guess I owe JSL a blog post), we went to Disney World, NHL turned 6, to name a few. I know that some people do special things for their blog-o-versaries, but I couldn’t decide what to do for mine. Anyone have any ideas?

Yes, I know that technically I pushed this post live on Thursday, but I’m still going to make this an Aloha Friday post. So my Aloha Friday question will be: What should I do for my 1 year Blog-o-versary?

Thank you Kailani at An Island Life for starting this. Please head over to her blog to say hi. Also, remember to sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.

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