Yahoo! is celebrating its 10th birthday today, and is giving away free Baskin-Robbins ice cream. I already enjoyed my Peanut Butter ‘n Chocolate, but if it’s too late to get the free ice cream, at least check out the “netrospective” listing the top 100 moments of the web since Yahoo!s birth.
I haven’t used Yahoo! search in a few years (Google is my friend), but I still use My Yahoo! daily to track stocks and news.
Today marks the release of WordPress 1.5 “Strayhorn”, and I can say that I’ve successfully upgraded to the stable version. As I mentioned before, I’ve been running on the 1.5 beta for about a month, and everything seems to be working great. The new themes system and improved plugin API are wonderful. The comment spam protection in the core is much improved. Go checkout the bugtracker changelog and changelog on the wiki for more details.
For all one or two of you out there subscribed to the syndication feed (RSS or atom), you may have noticed that a bunch of old posts appeared. After getting hit with a ton of comment and trackback spam, I’ve finally upgraded to one of the WordPress nightly builds (1.5-beta-1 2005-01-18). It probably doesn’t look much different on your end, but the backend is much improved, and I have moved my design over to using the themes, so upgrades should be a simple tar -xzf wordpress.tar.gz away. This should also improve my ability to deal with all the spam that is a pain in the ass. I promise I will update soon, since I finally have a little free time.
When I registered david-s.net four years ago, VeriSign had just swallowed up Network Solutions and was one of the only registrars for domain names, so I decided to plunk down the $30 or so and make my little home on the internet. Every year, November 16th rolls around and its the big decision, do I really want to keep my domain for another year? If so, is it worth it to stay at VeriSign/Network Solutions? For the past 3 years, the answers were yes and yes (because I’m lazy).
This year, I decided that it was time to switch away from the evil dictator of registrars, and move elsewhere. That somewhere ended up being Go Daddy for two main reasons, its cheap and easy. I signed up for my new registrar on November 1st, put in my info, set my domain to transfer and thought I was on my way to freedom.
I thought it would be easy, but Network Solutions had to try and make it as difficult as possible. I check my email and I get a message “Domain Transfer Failed - Status Not Valid”. Hmm, I’ll just login to my Network Solutions try to unlock my domain so that I can transfer it over. I look around the control panel and there is no information to be found about transferring your domain to another registrar. Oh, they’ll tell you how to transfer your other domains to NetSol, but they won’t tell you how to turn off the lock. I checked the “DomainProtect” feature, and its turned off. Check the whois, see REGISTRAR-LOCK. I figure maybe it takes a day, so I wait and reinitiate the transfer two days later. No go. I don’t have time for this, so instead I go play paintball (looks like they need some help with a little XSLT) with people from work and take out my domain frustrations by shooting each other. Monday rolls around and I’m at home for a quick lunch, so I decide to call up NetSol. It only takes 3 menus and I got to speak to a real live human being (not bad). I tell him I want to unlock my domain so I can transfer it. He says ok, looks around, flips a switch and says the status should. Check the whois, still see REGISTRAR-LOCK. Give it some more time. (DNS changes take less time to propagate.) Tuesday comes along, lunch time again, call up NetSol, ask them to flip the switch again, this time for real. Guy says ok, should be set. Check whois, ACTIVE. Woo hoo!! I thank the tech support guy, and he asks why I’m leaving NetSol, maybe because I figure the world’s largest registrar would let me flip my own switches rather than have to hunt down tech support to make them do it for me. Sorry, but I’m glad you’re no longer the gatekeeper of top level domains. Welcome to something called competition. Re-re-re-initiate transfer. Fill in a couple forms, say sayonara to NetSol and konichiwa Go Daddy.
The new ICANN policy on registrar transfers takes effect today (November 12), to which Kottke over-reacts, but then corrects himself. This policy is actually meant to help out all of the poor souls who have sold themselves to the NetSol devil. Anyways, I have my new registrar and the world is at peace, correct?
No, things are never that easy. While I was busy at work the past few days, it looks like my host, bloghosts, decided to take a nose dive. Now they aren’t completely dead (you’re probably reading this off of their server right now), but its time to find a new host. In the 5 months I hosted my site with them, I was very satisfied. No longer did I have to worry about DNS, Apache, PHP, mySQL, Postfix, or anything else. All of that customer satisfaction went right down the drain. No advance notice, no email, not even a post on their RSS feed (and they called themselves bloghosts)!
I did some quick research, and decided to splurge a little to go with TextDrive. Why TextDrive? Take a look at the specs for one. I’ll have a lot more storage space to move my pictures back, shell access to a nice FreeBSD server to play around on, Subversion, PostgreSQL, Python, Ruby, and hack away on WordPress. Plus its run by a good group of people. Now I’m just waiting for the DNS to transfer, so if I disappear, I should be back in a bit.
This is going to be my last post from bloghosts. I’ll let you know once I’m up and running on TextDrive.
The answer to the question is only a click away (or /usr/bin/whois david-s.net if you’re so inclined).
Thanks to Spam Assassin, almost every spam I get is nicely marked and ready to delete. Every once in a while I scan through all the email that gets marked as spam to make sure there isn’t anything important in there. While I was going through all of the junk (400 messages), i noticed something strange, there were tons messages trying to sell Rolexes. I don’t know how or why they thought I’d be a great target to send 80 messages to get me to buy a watch. Somehow my email has turned into a New York City street corner trying to pawn off their shady goods. 20% of the trash I get in email is trying to sell me a thousand dollar watch. Sorry to spoil your marketing scheme, but I’ll be sticking with my Skagen, and if I ever decide to waste that much money on a watch, it’ll probably be a Movado.