It's alive! It's alive!

My blog at sodsbrood.com has been resurrected from the dead, twice no less. After some more prodding of administrators via the site5 forums, my site was finally unlocked last night around eight o'clock. Within ten minutes, I had promptly, but accidentally, deleted the entire directory where my blog is stored, blog and all.

That deletion has to rank up there with the most stupid things a man has ever done while trying to "fix" something that wasn't broken. I won't go into the details of how it happened. Suffice it to say, another shamefaced appeal to site 5 for help resulted in my blog being restored from a backup.

I haven't made up my mind yet about switching to WordPress. I like the idea of having both my Blogger blog and my b2 Blog available on one site, but the import from b2 looks like it is much more difficult and fraught with danger than the import from Blogger. After my little deletion fiasco of last night, I am understandably gun shy of tinkering too much right now.

Both b2 Evolution and WordPress have their advantages and faults--b2 has no ability to import from other blog tools, and WordPress does not support multi-blogs--but for now, I think I am just going to stick with b2 and enjoy the peace of a stress-free blogging experience...at least until the spammers find me again.

Where have all the blog posts gone?

On Friday, exactly seven days after my blog went dark, I finally had an email from technical support, from the same person who emailed originally to say the directory where my blog lives was being locked. Short and sweet, the email said that the directory could be unlocked if I could tell them what applications and scripts I was running. That I did. A profound silence ensued, and the blog remains dark.

I suppose this Friday, I will receive yet another teasing email about the situation.

To occupy myself this weekend, I spent Saturday and Sunday working on a new site, in case the old one is never made accessible. Even if the directory is opened again, I intend to replace my blog with my redesigned site, after importing my old blog posts of course.

The new blog is going to use WordPress software, rather than b2 Evolution, for a couple reasons. WordPress can import from both Blogger and b2. I've already done an import from Blogger, and it worked perfectly. This was something I was never able to do with b2. It will be great to have all my blog posts going back to Spring 2003 on one site.

WordPress also offers better spam fighting plugins. This is very important to me. I don't know if the amount of spam I was receiving had anything to do with site5 shutting down my other blog, but I know I was growing sick and tired of manually filtering hundreds of spam comments every day because the b2 spam filter wasn't catching them.

The one drawback to WordPress is that it is not a multi-blog blogging utility. This was important in my initial decision a year ago to use b2 rather than WordPress; it is less important to me now. I really did not write in my other blogs that often. Occasionally, I wrote in my "film journal" blog, and occasionally I published in my "fiction" blog, but mostly I wrote within my main blog. It may be that using categories can take the place of multiple blogs.

Also, WordPress offers a feature called "Pages" that basically turns WordPress into a simple web design application like a stripped down Dreamweaver. You can create a page for your profile, and it is a static web page, not a blog entry. This could conceivably be a better format than a blog for film reviews and fiction anyway.

The site is still in the "test and fix" stage. I'll deploy this weekend, or sooner if my b2 site is reenabled. I'd like to have all my posts from 2003 to the present available at once, but if my b2 site is still down I'll probably go ahead and launch the new site this weekend. I can always import my old posts at a later date.

Times Select

Among other items I would have blogged about this week, if my stream of patter hadn't been interrupted with technical problems, was the introduction of the New York Times "Times Select." Otherwise known as yet another attempt by newspapers to start charging for what they have been giving us for free for nearly ten years.

I was slightly annoyed on Wednesday to discover that I could not read Maureen Dowd's weekly column; nor was Frank Rich's Sunday column available. I stewed about it for the better part of the day.

No doubt these newspapers have regretted ever making their news available for free on-line, and editors have been looking for ways to renege on the unspoken agreement between consumer and publisher that whatever is available in print will be available for free on-line. I can understand that it costs money, lots of money in fact, to maintain a "free" on-line newspaper. However, as a consumer I always find it irksome to find I have to pay for something I am used to having for free. It's almost like a bait and switch: the Times hooks you with their great opinion columns, then says, "Not so fast. You gotta pay us fifty bucks a year if you want to continue reading."

But my point is, I see both sides.

I signed up for the fourteen day trial after much inner wrangling. I haven't decided whether to let myself be billed for the year subscription. I can cancel anytime within the fourteen day period.

What do you folks think? Is it worth paying? Is there somewhere else I can find these columnists? Is anyone else signing up for this service?

Another worry is that all of the free, on-line news sources are anxiously watching the Times with little lines of drool dribbling down their chin. If the Times discovers that people will pay for this service, will the Washington Post and other newspapers follow suit? I don't want to indirectly contribute to the consumerization of news and information on the Internet.

Technical Difficulties

The experiment at sodsbrood may be over, at least for me, anyway. I have been locked out of my blog since last Friday, and as another Friday is fast approaching, I have to consider that I may never post at sodsbrood again.

My technical difficulties began sometime late in the afternoon on Friday the sixteenth. My friend, an administrator of sodsbrood, sent me an email he had received from the owners of our server space. The text of that brief email was as follows:

Hi,

We've disabled access to the public_html/pilgrim account. A script (send.php) located in that account was being used to send out spam. Please contact us asap so that we can resolve this matter.

If you have any further questions or experience any problems, please let us know. Thank you.

Regards,

[name withheld]

We both responded ASAP as requested, but in the ensuing six days we have not received a single email either explaining why the account was summarily locked nor how to fix this problem.

From what I gather, the people who own the server space believe that I am a spammer. Thus, if you try to go navigate to my sodsbrood blog, you are greeted with the ominous message "Forbidden. You don't have permission to access /pilgrim on this server." My own investigation reveals that the permissions have been changed on my "pilgrim" directory, which is the UNIX equivalent of changing the locks on the doors of a house. I can't even redirect traffic here to my Blogger site.

For an indefinite period of time, I am going to try to pick up where I left off at sodsbrood and continue to blog from here, my Blogger site. I hope you will bear with me as I readjust to "blog serfdom" at Blogger, and be prepared for another address change if suddenly, miraculously my sodsbrood space is unlocked.