Category: Site Info

Recently, my Web host of several years got bought/merged/whatever with Data393, who also owns HugeHosting as well as a couple other companies, from what I understand. Prior to the merge, my service was great, my tickets were answered and taken care of in less than an hour, the speed was fast, and my sites rarely went down, if at all.

And lately, the connectivity has sucked, the tickets have taken a while to get my direction, the family-like atmosphere is gone, and us clients were completely left in the dark about the details of the merger, how it affected us, features/benefits, or anything of the sort.

While I’d like to give my host the benefit of the doubt, I’m starting to get the feeling I’ve held out hope to long, and those thoughts were confirmed after talking to a couple other clients of theirs as well. They’re moving, and I’m thinking I should, too.

So if anybody out there has any suggestions, recommendations, I’d like to hear it. I’m looking for a reseller solution, 500 megs of space (at least), Cpanel-powered, 30 gigs of bandwidth, and DAMN good support. Ideally, I’d like a dedicated box or a VPS, but I know that’s not probably going to happen. I’m looking for a family-like feel with big time power and service — which is what I used to get when I first signed on with my host when they were based back here in Oregon. And I want somebody who knows how to setup a server properly so it’s not doomed for failure — in other words, if you leave the Exim and Apache settings at the default when you setup and install it, I will not be hosting with you.

E-mail me at jake [insert that funny looking symbol here] utterlyboring [period] com if you have any recommendations.

I’m posting this here, mostly for my own benefit, but for yours as well, so I can make sure I’m getting things changed/fixed on this site and you can suggest things as well (and these are in no particular order):

• Replace Bloglet with Dada Done
• Restructure Heirarchy of site, creating cruft-free, date-based URLs, setting up redirects for old stuff, and getting rid of “blog” in URLs. Need to make sure I get proper plugins to do this Done.
• When Blogrolling Gold membership expires, setup MySQLinks instead. Done.
• Fix Comment Preview Template BugFixed, though I’ll just incorporate real-time preview as you type.
• Setup a WYSIWYG Editor for entries (and possibly comments?)
• Setup a Mobile Edition
• Setup Atom 0.3 Feed Done
• Setup a syndication page
• Make the site at least W3C HTML 4.0 validated … maybe.
• Setup other skins for the blog
• Change comment notifications. Done.
• Added on 1/28: Speed things up a bit with some MT Tuning Done.
• Added on 1/28: Get MT 2.661 Installed Done.

Of course, this is after I do the other pile of projects on my plate, as well as my day job, so I wouldn’t hold your breath on seeing the changes above anytime soon. I’ll be adding more to this list when I think of them.

But comment here if there’s something else you’d like to see!

OK, I’ve had it up to here with AOL. If it’s not one thing it’s another. I’ve constantly had trouble sending them messages with my mailing list. First they banned my IP. Then they said I wasn’t using RFC-compliant URLs (though AOL’s idea of an RFC is much different than the rest of the world). So I fixed those URLs (that were just part of my tracking system).

Then, I send out a mailing last night. And I get these errors back (this is all it ways…I’m not cutting it off intentionally):

SMTP error from remote mailer after end of data:

host mailin-01.mx.aol.com [205.188.159.57]: 554 TRANSACTION FAILED:

(HVU:B1) The URL contained in your email to AOL members has generated a high volume of complaints. Per our Unsolicit

Nice error AOL.

Just the same, because of this, I don’t encourage anybody with an AOL or Netscape.net account to sign up for my mailing list, as there’s a good chance you won’t get it. It’s not a problem with Dada, it’s a problem with AOL’s overzealous filtering of all things Internet.

Get a real email account and a real ISP, folks. You’ll be far better off.

If you’ve noticed the site’s been a bit less than responsive, bear with me, as the server that this site is on is falling victim to some jackass spammer on the server. Please be patient while my Web host is tracking the butthead down so he can shut him down. So if you’ve written me an email, it’ll get to me — eventually.

OK, on my Dada/Mojo powered nightly-mailings, I have about 10 people that are using AOL or Netscape.net (out of the 50 or so on my mailing list). Well, apparently AOL thinks I send those people too many e-mails and am spamming (despite the fact that I have another Dada install that send a mailing to about 150 AOLers, and it’s not banned). Note that if I were still using Bloglet, I would’ve never got these bounces back to see what was going on, but here are the bounces I got back:

SMTP error from remote mailer after initial connection:

host mailin-03.mx.aol.com [205.188.157.25]: 554-(RLY:B1) The information presently available to AOL indicates this

554-server is generating high volumes of member complaints from AOL’s

554-member base. Based on AOL’s Unsolicited Bulk E-mail policy at

554-http://www.aol.com/info/bulkemail.html AOL may not accept further

554-e-mail transactions from this server or domain. For more information,

554 please visit http://postmaster.info.aol.com.

I’m sending two messages per second, using the SMTP settings in Dada, and that’s hardly bulldozing the server. And my domain/IP isn’t blacklisted so why on earth is this happening?

Regardless, my Web host’s abuse department is looking into it. Does anybody out there have an AOL account (that they want to admit to ;-)) that I can email from this domain to see if it gets bounced?

So if you’re on my mailing list, and are using AOL or Netscape.net (two very poor choices, in my opinion), you’re probably not going to get it. Understand, folks, that if you get your Internet access from those folks, you don’t have to use them for e-mail. Yahoo! Mail has always been pretty good to me as an extra account, but there are dozens that are better than AOL, that’s for sure.

I’ve really yet to have too much trouble with comment spamming. I’ve had my dealings with them before, but my IP ban list keeps most of them at bay. However, I had one that probably would’ve run rampant on my site had I not locked his IP.

If you were on this site about 45 minutes ago, you would’ve noticed that this post had 90 comments on it. Yes, you read that right. The most any of my posts have had is about 25. Every single comment was by the same guy, and he submitting this oh-so-relevant comment:

Dear Apple,

I am a homosexual. I bought an Apple computer because of its well earned reputation for being “the” gay computer. Since I have become an Apple owner, I have been exposed to a whole new world of gay friends. It is really a pleasure to meet and compute with other homos such as myself. I plan on using my new Apple computer as a way to entice and recruit young schoolboys into the homosexual lifestyle; it would be so helpful if you could produce more software which would appeal to young boys. Thanks in advance.

with much gayness,

Father Randy “Pudge” O’Day, S.J.

Dear Father O’Day:

Thanks for your letter. Being Catholic myself, I know exactly what you’re talking about! It has always been our plan here at Apple Computer Inc to revolutionize personal computing with our high-quality and highly gay products.

I’m happy to answer your letter by letting you know that YES we will be releasing an entire hLife (“homo-life”) software line. You’ll be able to recognize it in stores by the small stylized logo depicting a large cock entering a tight anus with an Apple logo on it. (“Suddenly it all comes together” indeed!).

Anyway, I hope you and other members of our community will join us on our mission, and purchase the exciting new hLife boxed set. Only the boxed set comes with translucent cock rings!

Sincerely,

Harry Rodman

Vice-president

Homosexual Liaison Services

Apple Computer, Inc.

I’m going to take the approach of my Australian partner in crime, and post all of this moron’s relevant info in hopes that it gets spammed (too bad my site blocks quite a few spam bots already). Or, in case somebody’s bored, you can do a denial of service on the moron’s site:

IP Address: 202.186.7.251

Have fun with it.

The e-mail address that was included was a fake address at a good, legitimate domain, but the problem was that I made the mistake of clicking on the URL that the guy included. If you know what’s good for you, you will not go to http://ner0-0nline.0rg/1@stmea$ure/ (and I’ve intentionally replaced certain characters so you don’t accidentally copy and paste). If you do head there, for god-sakes, do it in a text-based browser. If you’ve seen the goats.cx image, you’ll need to understand that the goats.cx image is tame compared to URL — and it will do everything in its power to hi-jack your browser (latterly 100 pop up windows with equally disgusting crap as well as annoying background music).

For you coders out there, you can see the source code for the page here so you can see the nasty JavaScript. It vicious.

You can actually view the root of the site here which contains links to other browser hi-jacks including the one that took over mine (Last Measure). Good site to use to trash people’s home page, but page links to click on yourself.

You can view the Whois here. Needless to say, the owner of that site is getting crap for putting fake crap in his domain records.

I’m sure it’s not the site owner’s fault (though that Last Measure stuff is disgusting) that somebody posted 90 comments on one post on my site — he probably had nothing to do with it. But he is the one hosting some nasty browser hi-jacks, that’s for sure.

I’m working my way through my to-do list, and I’m going to work on restructuring the archives. After it’s all over, things should work fine, but until that point, just bear with me. Thanks 🙂

Update: I think I’ve got myself some decent URLs, now have a gigantic .htaccess file (both links in this entry should work, despite the different URLs), and have setup a far better structure here. One more thing to scratch off the to-do list.

UtterlyBoring.com is now the number one result on Google for “Ortman“. Granted, I’m on page five for “Jake” but it’s better than it was. And I’m in the top ten now for “boring.”

On a side note, a trip through my server logs shows that Kster.com is taking my RSS feed and blasting it up on to their site as content. Hello to all the folks who are visiting from there! Be sure to stop by the actual site here so you’ll be able to make comments and such. Meanwhile, to whomever runs that site: Make it a little more obvious that the content on your site is from mine, would ya? Thanks 🙂

I figured since Jon linked to my old CafeShops store, I’d better put something useful on it — something related to this site. So I’ve updated it, added some stuff, taken away some stuff, set some random prices (I barely make any profit on anything there), and re-setup the site.

So you can now buy UtterlyBoring.com t-shirts, tote bags, stickers, sweatshirts, etc… . Some of them have printing on the back which lists some of the random terms that have shown up in my referrer logs. Ladies, I’ve even put them on the front of clothing for you, if you want and excuse to have somebody stare at your chest.

I’ve left some of my orty.com brand merchandise up there, just for kicks. But check out the store, just in case you want to help pay for my medical bills, and if there’s something you like, let me know.

OK, done with commercial crap, I’ll have good links later.

Just a quick note. First off, thanks to Barney, who has agreed to fill folks in while I’m gone (and edit the grammar on my site, since he’s always picking on me for that — the anal bastard), and keep the site from getting stale (that’s assuming he has any free time after posting news over at Bend.com). Secondly, the site will be down from 9:00PM to 1:00 Pacific Time tomorrow. My web host is moving to a new datacenter, and it’s my server’s turn.

Tuesday will be my last day blogging for a bit, depending on how the surgery goes. I’ll try to empty out my “to blog” folder before then so you at least have something to keep you entertained if Barney doesn’t have time to post. Ken, Gregg: Remember you both still have author privledges here, so feel free to post.