echodrift

Spring Cleaning

I know, it isn’t spring. Not yet, though today had highs in at least the 50s and tomorrow the forecast is a high of 68F Who has 68F weather in the middle of February? This place, I guess. Anyway. I am finally mustering up the energy to take care of some behind the scenes things for echodrift and my other websites. The theme I’m still working on. Honestly, I thought about using a pre-made one but I’ve not found one that supports the width of photos that I’ve used in my posts. Of course, I haven’t looked that hard either because I really do enjoy making my own. I think. There is the part where I haven’t made one in two years that would seem to contradict that statement.

As these things usually do, the notion has struck me at a time when my access to a computer is going to be restricted for a few days. I am going to to try to hold on to that motivation and actually see it through, though. I’ve had a bit of a rough time this year. Work has had its usual high levels of stress and aggravation. My husband caught a bad case of pneumonia back in January. The 103F fever, scary shaking chills kind of pneumonia. He’s doing well now but is still very tired. I found out yesterday after having some small troubles breathing on Monday night that now I have a mild case of pneumonia. I don’t know if I can blame him for it but I can joke about it. We have plans for this weekend that I really don’t intend to back out of.

Throughout all of it I’ve not really been making time to do things I enjoy and have instead been sort of simply existing. Even my 365 project, which I was so gung ho about a few weeks ago, is fizzling. I missed yesterday and I don’t know that I can make myself take one more bland and completely uninspired photo just so that I can say “Hah! I have a photo for today.” I would much rather put time and effort into finding and taking photos like this:

Opportunities like that don’t come along every day, though. And I know that one has to get out and look for those opportunities but I don’t think I can do that right now.

I am going way off topic. This is what happens when I don’t really have a subject in mind, start writing late in the evening, and then realize that it’s much later in the evening and that I have many, many things to do before I sleep. So. I’m sick but hopefully getting better. Technical things will be going on for echodrift.com over the next few days. DNS servers will be changing so I will wait until everything is settled to start updating again. Updating is something I do fully intend to do. Lots to do this weekend and I’m not ready for it yet.

Upgrades

echodrift is finally running on WordPress 2.7. I know, I know. I meant to do this a long time ago but then one thing led to another which led to procrastination. What can I say? I have a few plugins left to upgrade but I don’t want to do that yet because I don’t want to screw some of my formatting up. If you spot anything that’s still off be sure to let me know.

I do have a post planned to talk about the strangely large list of TV shows I’m currently watching. Instead of working on it, though, I watched some of said shows. Oops. Instead, have a picture from today:

It definitely looks better on black. Speaking of photos, my 365 project is going OK so far. I’m up to Day 52. I still have decided what to do with my photoblog. I’m about to decide that I want to just find a way to include them here. Wonder if I can work that into the current layout…

Server woes

It would appear that I am having server trouble again. Yesterday I found out that my host had scheduled a maintenance that would last from 9:00 PM CST Friday until 7:00 AM CST on Saturday. The notification said that they only foresaw about 90 minutes of actual downtime in this 10 hour window.

However, shortly after this window began I found myself unable to access the site. I went to bed thinking surely it would be back up in the morning. It was not. As instructed I sent an inquiry to their support email account. An email account what was on a server affected by the maintenance. I thought that a little odd at first and it has turned out to cause a bit of a problem with emails being delayed for several hours.

I was finally able to get in contact with a member of their support staff through Twitter of all things. It turns out that HTTPD was off when the servers (at least, the one I’m on) were brought up from maintenance and had not been turned back on. Around 2:00 PM EST I received notification that it had been turned on and access to my sites was restored. This resolution came about more than six hours after I first attempted to contact support and over 15 hours since connection was first interrupted.

The notification I received did mention that downtime might last for more than 90 minutes. However, 90 minutes isn’t even close to 15 hours. Finally, everything appears to be functioning properly.

New year, new looks

This may not be 100% finished yet but I’m calling it quits for now. One can only take so much of staring at code and cursing WordPress. Really, why do you have to install a plugin in order to use PHP inside the content of a page? I usually just create a template for a specific page when I want to do that but this time I didn’t want to bother.

Also regarding WordPress and PHP, I cannot for the life of me figure out why it does not like my contact form the way I have it set up. It was all going swimmingly until the information actually validated. After that I just kept getting a “Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here.” I’ve been looking at that for hours and I’m still not sure what’s going on.

I also cannot figure out why the time isn’t displaying properly on my tweets. It works perfectly on my local copy but for some reason is 6 hours off on the actual site. I really don’t think that has anything to do with the fact that I was testing on WordPress 2.7 but who knows. Reason for that was so that I could find out if this theme would break when I upgrade. I’ll probably be saving that for tomorrow.

Continue reading…

Server move

I’m making plans to move servers over the weekend. I’m not sure when it’s going to get started or when it’s going to be finished. I’ve got some projects in the works that I hope to be bringing up once the transfer is successful so I’ll definitely be keeping busy until then.

Edit: Hey if you can see this it means the domain has propagated! Updates will be resuming shortly.