The Links

Tommy took on an impromptu interview from Alexia at the Young Scientist earlier this year – with interesting results

So all the rage lately appears to be about a lecturer who is trying to rickroll his students by slipping in lines from “Never Gonna Give You Up” during lectures. I think I’m going to skip all my Semester 2 lectures, just in case…

Smashing Magazine nit-picks through the new design of the White House.
Wait, why do we even care about that site?

So, 49£ is back. If you don’t know what that means, then you are completely fucking clueless. I’m not sure though if the new crowd will do better than everyone over on The Blog Pound – which was originally 49£ itself…
I’m confused :S

The Pics

Inappropriate Halo 3 screenshot of the week? (If you can’t see it, you fail)

The Vids

More failures in Halo 3!

• Started trying out a new DS emulator: iDeaS. In comparison to No$GBA, it runs at full speed, but does epically fail with sound. And I mean epically. Although it does have the ability to record your gameplay to an AVI, so once the sound problem is fixed, whoop-dee-doo!
• Microwaving Amp Tubes:
  
• Now that fail’s just wrong…
  

Yea, it’s pretty empty for the first one – but I’m going to hopefully have something better tomorrow (if I bother to come in, that is…)

Found over on Alexia’s Red Links.

I think I’d take this over Jackass any day

EDIT: I think WP has a bug, whereby if you embed a Flash video in the Visual editor, and then click on it, and set it to center-aligned – it gets changed into an image…

Found at The Blog Herald, via Alexia.

1. Would you rather the worst blog post you’ve ever written stay on the front page of Digg for a week or the best blog post you’ve ever written get zero Diggs?

Given how much I don’t like Digg after the whole impersonation fiasco, this one is simple for me – my best blog post ever getting no Diggs at all.

2. Would you rather have the last 30 seconds of your life or the first 30 seconds shown on video via your blog?

I’d probably have to say the last 30 seconds of my life. Most of my early life (i.e. 16-17 years) was never on the Internet, so why would I have my first half minute of existence (outside the womb) available for all to see? At least when I do die, there will hopefully be people who still read this stuff and would be interested in seeing it

3. Would you rather blog exclusively about blogging or not blog at all?

Not blog. I know that there are a load of people out there who do blog about everything blogging-related (I’m not going to name names here), but I’m not one of them. If I couldn’t blog about my everyday rants, then I wouldn’t. Although then you’d have to listen to me going on face to face

4. Would you rather have the ugliest blog design and the best content on earth or the most beautiful blog design and the lamest content?

Given how my current layout isn’t exactly the most colourful of arrangements (all my hex codes are the same character six times…), I’ll stick with worst design, best content. What’s the point in having a nicely laid out site when the content is complete and utter garbage * cough cough *

5. Would you rather that your blog be featured on Oprah every day for a week or linked to at the Google homepage for one hour?

Google please. Oprah’s gone downhill over the past decade or so, and I’m not entirely sure I’d like her legions of women followers all over my site (no offence to the guys out there who adore her!)

6. Would you rather have the most popular blog in the world but no blog revenue or the most profitable blog but no fans?

Now this is a bit of a toughie. It’d be great to have the most popular blog possible, just as long as the costs of hosting it weren’t astronomical (Not saying that Blacknight is expensive!). However, it would be great to be able to earn a huge amount from blogging, but not having any true fans would mean that there’s no heart to the blog… (I consider frequent commenters like Reflex and B’dum to be good enough as fans!)

7. Would you rather stop breathing or stop blogging?

Surprisingly, I had to think about this one

However, since ethere is more to life than blogging (i.e. gaming!), I’d have to pick stop blogging.

In summary…

I’m not really one to start memes around the blogging community, so I’m not going to tag anyone to do this themselves (that and I’m too lazy to!) – although I do await your participation.

Also, if you have any WYR? questions to ask me, feel free to do so. I’ll do my best to answer it, if I’m not ignoring you because I feel like it

Anyway, this whole thing started after Alexia moved from the breaking-every-half-hour-crappy BlueHost to Blacknight. I had always wanted to have my site(s) hosted on an Irish server, but up until recently, it all seemed overpriced in comparison to what I could get on the huge American hosts. Either pay €4 a month for 1GB of space and 10GB of bandwidth, or pay $4.20 a month for 5GB space and 250GB bandwidth? I think the answer is obvious!

Blacknight had always had a special blog hosting package available that would have suited my needs (OK, well maybe not my disk space needs), but the only problem with it was that you could only have a single domain on it, and no sub-domains at all. Given I use stuff.thechrisd.com as my hotlinking domain, it didn’t cut it. Recently though, they re-launched their service with new packages and site and other lark. The new most basic package was roughly the same price (€4.95/month) that was I was currently paying to GoDaddy ($6.99/month), and still came with more than what I’d need: 10GB space, 100GB bandwidth and the usual extras. Not exactly “Minimus”!

Friday

Right, so Friday afternoon, I bought myself a nice little one-year Minimus hosting package from Blacknight Things were looking up as I eventually uploaded my website backup to them, changed the configs, rerouted the domain DNS and everything. The RPWS site looked good, but I couldn’t really say the same for my site… Turns out I had made some changes since my backup from the end of July. A LOT of changes. Which led at first to some 500 errors, then to bigger and worse problems… I was beginning to think that this was going to turn into a hosting hell…

Now before you start thinking that I was all alone with a broken website, I have to commend the support services at Blacknight. There was always a very fast response from the team to my queries, and although I may have whined a bit about something, and I may have been a nuisance, their team always came through to attempt to help out. Seriously, I cannot stress how great their support team is.

Back to Friday, I was getting pressed for time, and couldn’t seem to fix the problems, so I had the DNS changed back to GoDaddy, with plans to re-attempt to transfer sometime next week. Which turned out to be today!

Monday

The first step I wanted to get done was to move the databases to Blacknight and get them setup and running before moving all the files over, so that I wouldn’t lose any Statpress logs, new comments (like what almost happen to one of Reflex’s comments on Friday!), and other things. All seemed to go according to plan, until the database connection errors started…

Onto the support team again just to make sure I wasn’t screwing up with the external options. Blacknight have the handy feature of allowing external hosts to access your databases, so I setup this option specifically for the move. Well, it seems that GoDaddy were having none of that, since the BN MySQL servers were getting no traffic from my GoDaddy site… Epic fail. Hence the few hours earlier where I had a filler page saying “Gimme a few minutes while I sort out databases”. Well, that kinda turned into a few hours…

I sent off a support mail to GoDaddy asking whether they allowed me to access other databases from my server, and whether they could turn it on or not for me. Realising though, that they’d take ages to get back to me, I went ahead and continued with making a new, more up-to-date backup of my site and uploading it to BN. Several hours later and everything is up to BN – and still no response from GoDaddy support!

Finishing Touches

There wasn’t really much else to do after uploading everything. Gallery was giving me a few errors on my site at first, and then was just giving notices, although I do have to blame that on the fact that I had left debug mode on (after the errors on Friday!), but that was soon sorted. Everything else looked fine, and as of now seems to work fine. All in all, today’s move was a LOT smoother than Friday’s!

Overall Opinions

So, based on this move, I’ve changed my mindset regarding a few things:

• Switching to a more local host is MUCH better, even if it may cost more or if you don’t get as good a deal as what you had before (judging by the fact it took only half an hour to upload all my files, while it took 3 hours to download them from GoDaddy!)
• Try not to forget to turn debug mode off…
• DNS can resolve either very fast or very slowly, depending on which you don’t want. When I wanted it to take a while earlier, it happened quickly…
• Remember that your FTP client can hide your .htaccess on you…
• GoDaddy support sucks balls. Seriously big, chocolate salty balls…
• Michele Neylon is one of the best CEOs there is
• The DCU FTP proxy fails miserably when used with my FTP client

So yea, that’s about it. When you read this, try and remember it’s powered by an Irish web hosting company, that perform a lot better than the big, over-the-top American hosting providers.

PS: The RPWS site is still as of now using the GoDaddy services. I still haven’t moved it yet, but then again it’s not the number one priority here!