As many of you know, yarntomato.com has been offline since early January. There are a few reasons, one of which you know–I gave birth to our first son on December 14, 2005. The other two reasons–the main reasons, actually–are fanlistings and Blogger. I shall explain.
I host the wool fanlisting (currently offline, but back soon). Scripts for managing fanlistings are immensely helpful, but are often the target of hackers. I guess it must be fun, because once you find a security flaw, it’s easy to find tons of sites hosting fanlistings, which you can then have your way with. Hmph.
Anyhow, my site was hacked in November when a security hole was discovered in PHPFanBase, which I was using to maintain the wool fanlisting. I quickly recovered and switched to phpFanList. Unfortunately, a security bug was discovered in that script and my site was hacked again in January. With a new baby in the house, I barely had time to take down the stuff the hackers put on my site, much less repost my old content.
Contributing to the difficulty of regaining my site’s content was the fact that it’s been nearly impossible for me to publish to my site with Blogger since the beginning of December. The times I have published have been the result of excruciating workarounds or pure luck. In a nutshell, one day in early December Blogger kept hanging at 0% when I tried to publish. This happens about 95% of the time and has continued to this day.
I contacted my host and they don’t believe the problem is on their end because I can ftp to my site perfectly fine with my ftp program (which in agreement with what is written on this page of Blogger Help). Several possible solutions have been posted here and that’s the reason I’m posting today. I’m using the workaround posted by webprince: “What did work for me was to avoid entering any FTP username or password on the main ‘publishing’ settings page. Instead, wait until Blogger prompts to enter it after you click to publish.” I’m crossing my fingers it continues to work for me because Blogger absolutely will not respond to my question except with automated e-mails. Every time I receive one, I reply, hoping I will hit the magic number of replies before a human actually reads what I have written. I’m not holding my breath, though.
I know, I know, I could switch to WordPress or something like that. But that’s work (installation, maintenance, upgrading, etc.) and this is supposed to be fun. At least that’s what I thought in my blissful ignorance when I started blogging. I’m not quite as ignorant any more, but I’m going to try to go on blissfully anyway!
Oop! I almost forgot one last reason. Our high speed internet connection has seemed like 56K dialup lately. Gotta get ‘em to come out here and fix that.
At any rate, stay tuned because I will be back talking about what I’m here for… crochet!
