Housekeeping at Waveflux

Made a couple of changes here at the ol’ blog. The biggest change was also the one that You the Visitor would be unlikely to notice: a change in web hosting companies. I’ve kicked Total Choice Hosting to the curb. You may have noticed an occasional blog outage here marked by a “This website is temporarily suspended” notice. Sometimes this was the result of my credit card not allowing automatic charges by TCH, but at other times it resulted from TCH pulling the plug due to load issues caused by abuse of a script (read Movable Type). In the past I’ve been able to work with the TCH folks to solve the problem, and their customer service has been generally helpful. Last time around, though, I ran into a TCH rep - the assistant general manager, no less - who was by turns defensive, perfunctory, and downright rude in his communications. Odd indeed for an official of a company that touts its customer service. Maybe it’s just a function of advancing age on my part - that is, an decreased willingness to eat shit - but the way I figure it, I can get rude behavior for free. I certainly won’t pay eight-ninety-five a month for the privilege. So dumping TCH was not only an easy decision, but supremely satisfying.

The new hosting hotness: LivingDot. Funny name, but excellent service so far. And much speedier response times to service tickets than I was accustomed to with TCH. LivingDot claims blog-friendliness as a strength; indeed, it’s an official Movable Type hosting provider. Once I signed on with them, they transferred the entire weblog from the old host to the new digs with hardly any downtime - files, settings, and all. Actually, “they” is a tech named Robin. She rocks. I’ll be taking notes on my experience with my new hosting overlords, but so far, so good.

For you WordPress folks: LivingDot speaks your language too.

Evidence of other changes may be seen on the right side of your screen. I’ve added excerpts of recent comments to the blog for your browsing pleasure and as a nod to my clever commenters. I had decided on this back when I added direct links to individual comments a while back. I shrunk the text by a point, but it should still be quite legible for you young’uns with 20/20 vision. The rest of you, presbyoptics that you may be, probably wear glases or contacts anyway. If not, you can hit Ctrl-Plus (Windows) or Cmd-Plus (Mac) to enlarge the text. I’ll probably add a text enlarge/decrease feature to the blog once I figure out how.

I also darkened the font of the blog’s main content column. It’s the same color as the word “Waveflux” in the logo. Could you tell?

Also a new epigraph, courtesy of David Mamet. I just watched Glengarry Glen Ross again this past weekend. Love that movie.

I may add some more features to the site. Maybe a bookblog? I guess that means I gotta read some more books.

I plan to upgrade to whatever the latest version of MT is in the next couple of weeks. I wonder if LivingDot would do that for me. They very well might. Hmm. I’m liking this hosting change more and more.