Updates will come soon.

Two weeks ago I noticed that traffic dried up. After some digging around, I realized Google had de-listed my pages because of spam. After more digging around, I realized that my blog was probably hacked, thanks to an outdated version of WordPress. And with a touch more digging, I found out that my host (Yahoo) was not updating WordPress to the current versions.

Fair enough – I thought I would just update the blog. Silly me. Yahoo did not provide a mechanism to just update the blog. Fair enough – I will just move the blog to a different host. Silly me. Yahoo only archived the content in raw SQL files. After a bit of wrangling, I figured out how to convert them to the standard .SQL file.

I signed up for a new host – Dreamhost. They don’t have the best reputation but my blog will not bring their servers down; and I like their general system. I signed up. I import the database of content but nothing shows up. I start pruning unnecessary database tables til I reach the bare minimum – mainly, comments, posts, options, and links. Content starts showing up.

I log in to make some changes. Silly Me. I am locked out – “Permission denied.” After digging through countless pages, I finally find the gem – pjh’s post (2nd to last on this page): http://wordpress.org/support/topic/53261/page/2?replies=80#post-294408. Everything works.

I do some dry runs – re-install the blog a few times from beginning to end – make sure I’ve got it down. I do. Set everything up. Great, time to switch the domain name from Yahoo to Dreamhost. This should have been trivial but something got screwed up – site was completely down for a few hours. Got it back up. Uh oh, my email no longer works – where is it? The old stuff is somewhere in Yahoo; the new stuff somewhere on Google (Dreamhost uses Google for their mail servers.) Get that straightened out. Resubmit my site to Google for inclusion into their search engine. Cross fingers. I can only hope the RSS feed still works.

Despite having had some success with computers, I often think they will be our downfall. I am more technical that your average person; and this whole process was quite trying, not to mention time-consuming. I don’t know what the average blogger would have done if they had been in my shoes?

The blog should be up and running, available everywhere. I have no less than six different accounts to administer (Dreamhost, WordPress, Google Webmaster, Google Mail, Google Analytics, and Google Apps) – wouldn’t it be nice if Google actually made their products talk to each other? They may have a great search engine but, aside from Maps and Checkout, the rest of their products leave a lot to be desired.

As for WordPress 2.5 – I don’t like it. The preview post feature does not work. The layout is less intuitive than before. Such is life.

But what about the food?

There will be a few posts coming up soon – The French Laundry, Manresa, McCrady’s, potentially a great sushi restaurant in Atlanta, and Ubuntu.

That should last until my London/Paris trip. Booked so far – Fat Duck, Le Meurice, Ledoyen, L’Ami Jean, and Sa.Qua.Na.

All is almost back to normal.

- chuck