Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

Firstly, I would like to apo­lo­gise to all my lovely read­ers for all the erro­neous shenanigans and the seem­ingly never-ending game of “musical blogs” that I’ve been play­ing since Friday.

I hope that you all even­tu­ally find your way over here so that we can all relax together with a cup of tea, have a catch-up and ulti­mately engage in a big group hug to sooth the trauma and dis­rup­tion our daily blog-reading has suffered. I am sorry to my blog­ging bud­dies for all the con­fu­sion and over-complication that has arisen as a res­ult of the rather big mess caused by my old hosts. For those of you that didn’t read the pass­worded post on my tem­por­ary blog, I recom­mend that you now read the whole story here (no pass­word required).

I am also sorry to all of you that took the time to read, com­ment and par­take in the three of February’s posts that were sadly caught in the cross­fire and are no more. It makes me sad that those posts and your com­ments are gone forever. This little blog and the inter­ac­tion that occurs as a res­ult of it, are very import­ant to me and I feel very dis­ap­poin­ted that even just a small part of that exper­i­ence has been taken away.

Still, it is a small loss really when you con­sider how very stress­ful, time-consuming and rel­at­ively expens­ive this saga has been.

It is also worth not­ing at this point that all the “registered user” accounts are gone. Sadly, there was no way I could save them. If you would like to (re)gain the abil­ity to read Par­tially Private posts, please take a second to register.

For the record: I am now hos­ted at Site5; a decision based on my own research and coupled with the invalu­able advice gleaned from fel­low blog­gers. Site5 had the bits and bobs I wanted, came highly recom­men­ded by people I trus­ted with this sort of thing and were very reas­on­ably priced, par­tic­u­larly as I took advant­age of their 14% Valentine’s dis­count. (The reason I pre­vi­ously referred to this saga’s expens­ive­ness was because I will effect­ively lose 2 months worth of host­ing on my old account as a res­ult of the old host’s cock-ups).

For­tu­nately, my domain names were not inex­tric­ably tied to my host­ing account (I learnt from that mis­take years ago), so I get to keep my lovely web addresses and all links should be up and work­ing ASAP, if they’re not already.

I am gradu­ally set­tling in after a monu­mental brain-sneeze on my part wherein I borked the .htac­cess file last night and caused untold sav­age for about 6 hours, dur­ing which my pathet­ic­ally shame­ful sup­port ticket was answered and the prob­lem duly remedied. The main delay was caused by the fact that the domain pointer carry-on took forever to propag­ate and sort itself out and then there was the small mat­ter of my theme being totally screwed. Joy.

I’ve tried my best to restore all of the posts and com­ments right up until the end of Janu­ary 2008. My back-up (WXR) file was approx 3.8MB and the upload limit on this place is only 2MB, luck­ily I man­aged to get around the prob­lem with the aid of this post on the WP Sup­port for­ums. It was a bit of an arse to have to cut my back-up WXR file into chunks, but the other method people spoke of that involved .htac­cess just res­ul­ted in the afore­men­tioned hoo-hah and sup­port ticket. So, if you ever try to restore your blog using Word­Press’ export/import fea­tures and the file is too big to import, I sug­gest just divid­ing it into bits like the forum post says. It’s a bit of a faff, but worth it. Quick tip: Before you “export” your posts and com­ments, clear out all the crap caught by Akismet, it will help keep your WXR file-size down.

If you have a dig about and find some­thing broken, the please, please do tell me either via the Com­ments or by send­ing little mes­sages of help­ful­ness to my email box: claire@claire.nu. I can’t fix it if I don’t know it’s broken in the first place.

I’m so glad to have my blog and you guys back again! I hope that this will be a “fresh start” and reg­u­lar post­ing will resume in due course.