Chaoselbows.com Life, like your elbow, is chaos

Tonight I am going to upgrade the live sites, so there is a chance of not being available in the evening.

The new environment will have over 200 options and environment possibilities for the web site.The old site had about 120. much of this is related to a move from Flexinode to Content construction kit. This probably doesn't mean anything to you but effectively there will be a change in structure for the web site. There will be a sandbox area and a production area, running seperate but identical databases.

this is new, I used to sandbox on my local computer. This worked fine, but I need to see what it looks like in a "real" environment as well. I can't make my local computer real enough to make the environment a good test. If that makes sense.

Due to a dramatic increase in trackback spam, Trackback functionality has been turned off.

I am working on upgrades to the eist and website family. i.e. the various sites that I am supposed to be keeping working here. The good news is that the site upgrade process is pretty straight forward. The bad news is that as soon as I upgrade a site, I get a redirect error on it. Soo, I am still working on this. I have about an hour a day to devote to this process, which doesent seem like much.

What I have to do to upgrade:
1. back up the database
2. back up the site.
3. upgrade to drupal 4.7.1
4. upgrade to 5.0
5. upgrade to 5.1(possibly the dev pack, still investigating an issue with the upgrade file.)
6. test.

So I am stuck on testing now.

add to that and the ongoing yet mysterious mail problem (mail usually gets through, but not always) and this is a pretty busy hour. I have started getting up at 5 am to give me time to futz with it.

I just placed the Tagadelic module in service, it gives you a cloud of tag information (thats the line that reads Chaoselbows: under categories and allows you to search all the keywords within your view. keen. visit it at http://www.chaoselbows.com/tagadelic

I have found that it usually takes 2 calls to ipower to get them to do something, so I have started making a practice of calling them twice in succession, waiting through their repetitive new age calming hold music and asking them to do the same thing again. Usually this works.

Of course, since my domain "expired" for them and i have my domain for "life" and it is "locked' there is a huge hassle getting my domain back from them. I thought I transferred it successfully last week, but friday they claimed it back (or I never transferred it?) and on october 3 it expired. Since I registered this back in 2002, and I have changed emails since then, and I can't get the email address back (it was on a different a roadrunner account and once you create it it is in use for all time) my only choice to keep the site running is to pay ipower a different 7.00 fee to renew my domain. and I can't get them to just subtract it from the 200 dollars or so they owe me for work they never did and renewing my whole account without warning which I told them I didn't want.

Well, it look like all went ok during the site move. I am absolutely astonished as I have done this once before when ipower moved me to a different server. That move was a complete nightmare.

This one hasn't been fun, but it has gone much better than I thought it would have.

So, What's going on?

Ipower, in its infinite wisdom, restarted the mysql database program in the middle of a cron job. So, all the tables that were open on this and the 10 other websites (or so) were corrupted. That's why the content looks funny, no one has any access to it, the access and organic group tables being the ones that were open. This is true for ALL the sites. I am trying to fix them as soon as I can move the pointers from ipower to here. So, it will be another day at least while things stablize. The annoying part is that the crash came just after I spent a lot of time on things here. At least half the time was reloading modules, since I think ipower was having serious problems with disk space or something, since I couldn't get the files to show up properly.

Please Join us at our place for a super-deluxe party of epic porportions. It has been far too long since we have hosted an event. Please http://www.chaoselbows.com/rsvp with a dish to pass, if you want. This party is a designated Ghost-out, meaning if you lurk on the web site, you are especially invited to join so we may meet each other. We will have some board games, some party games, food, beverages (Adult and childish) and attendees ranging in age from 6 on up. Please invite a friend and tell us about it. If it is nice we will be out on the back deck, if it is not nice we will be inside.

The party will be at 41 Rock Cut Road, Rensselaer NY 12144. Our phone number is 518-587-2606. See the Map of 41 Rockcut Rd

Chaoselbows now is crawled by Google and successfully has a site map running. I am still figuring out the system, but basically if private is private, public is public, and if it isn't marked it's in kind of a wierd state, where it is public to admin level users and the person who wrote it, but not to anyone else.

Please help out chaoselbows if you can by increasing the diversity of content here. For example, if you want to keep a weblog for personal reasons, please do so. Some of you such as Librarian, have whole websites that are yours for the asking. I am working on a "multi site" use of my web host, and everything appears working. http://www.eduxonline.org and http://www.livingpotential.org are two sites that I am running for friends, they will be moved to this new format this week, so things will be interesting there, too.

Well, the site is almost ready to go public. If you don't want something to be seen by all and sundry, mark it private or put it into a different group. There is lots more privacy here on this site than there was before, so please ask if you don't understand something.

We will go public sometime friday.

I now have test.chaoselbows.com running as a separate web address. it is completely separate configuration from here, but uses the same "codebase" meaning that I only have to maintain one copy of the working web page code

Wheee!

This is so cool!