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.

This post was published on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 7:02 pm and is filed under Blogosphere, Updates. A Printer Friendly version is also available.
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