Messages

The frugality sites I frequent all say that a late model used car gives you the best bang for the buck. '89 ... is not a late model, and is worth it only if you really love it.

Well it's no big deal, except I found out just now that the old script got fried with my hard drive a year ago. That's how long I haven't bought any concert DVDs. But I'm doing decently well at reconstructing it.

Getting back to this after about a year, with a new OS version and new hardware... I'll be setting up Mplayer and the scripts again, but have there been any tools developed in the mean time that simply rip audio from DVDs in a more organised way?

I also know you probably weren't too pleased with the downtime that kept cropping up... That was the most annoying, as I know it was a real problem for people, even though it was occurring because of the datacenter's networking infrastructure, and not though mismanagement on my part. Didn't help that they scheduled most of their repair time for late night in the US, and that made it mid-day for you.

Nobody likes downtime. But I also accept that it happens and your responsiveness to queries has been pretty good, especially for a one-man operation. The recent incidents merely spurred me into action on a plan I'd had for almost a year.

As for the terms... I assume you mean the rules about pornographic stuff, since ROCR often involved nudity. Again, I understand and don't fault you for it. I'm just in a tricky place, because I have to balance things with a U.S.-centric sense of permissibility, as well as the fact that many users and viewers here are underage. If I'm wrong, and your talking about the newsbox requirement for having a domain name... well, I won't apologize, but I do understand. Once "xepher.net" isn't even on the address bar, that's the only way left for viewers to know a site is hosted here, and hopefully attract new users.

It was both those things and more. The advertising policy was beginning to feel restrictive. You've been dilligent about reacting to requests to allow new ad providers, but I no longer wanted to have to ask. I want to monetise the site more and to be able to respond more quickly to new developments. I missed out on ADSDAQ when it was new, for example. I might implement it on the site, or I might not, but I missed that crucial momentum when it was the talk of the webcomics world.

Of course, now  that I'm paying for the site, I'll have to monetise it more just to get that investment back. But at current dollar to Euro exchange rates, I'm not exactly hurting.

I don't have perfect freedom now, of course. Lunarpages has its own set of limitations, like the lack of shell access unless I pay more. It just so happens that where I'm at now, this specific set of limitations affects me less than the ones at Xepher. And while I thought Arclight was a big step ahead in stability and performance, this new server does outperform it

I'm glad we're on the same page about who Xepher can serve best, from your answer to Fes.


Anyway, this got longer than I expected, but suffice to say, I wish you the best, and I'll leave the site and stuff up for at least a couple months or so here, even if I don't hear from you. If you could just do me the favor and let me know when you actually don't need it anymore though, that'd be best. And if you feel like it, lemme know what specific problems you had with the service (or me.) Don't worry about hurt feelings or anything, just be honest. I'd like to know what to work on improving for the future.
[/quote]

I moved ROCR off Xepher.net some two weeks ago. That move had been on the cards for a long time. I've always been grateful to Xepher for offering the space, and I've found him to be very supportive and approachable, especially keeping in mind that he's just one guy with a linux box who needs to sleep every once in a while, but since the move to Arclight, I've been uncomfortable with the terms on which Xepher's been offered (I want to be the sole arbiter of what goes on my site and what doesn't) and with the non-standard way things were done on the technological end (Arclight runs wonderfully most of the time, but whenever I need support for a third-party app like Wordpress or Willowcms, I have to work around the lack of FTP functionality, PHP safe mode and/or the permissions set-up). So now that I'm a little better funded, I've packed up to Lunarpages. No hard feelings, I hope - I would recommend Xepher to any artist who is in the same position I was when I joined, and I would tell them that I've been 99% happy with the service over the past couple of years.

That reduces rocr.xepher.net to a mirror. Actually, I'd be happy to cancel it at some time. All the content of the old site has been moved over except for the old Gallery installation, and it's time that died. But inevitably, a lot of the links on the new site, especially image links in the blog, still point to rocr.xepher.net. In time, I'll run some scripts on the new blog so all those URLs are changed.

But it's not up to me to decide that. Xepher, are you OK with some sort of grace period for me to fix stuff up, change all my links and tie up all the loose ends before pulling the plug?

Off-topic: Xepher, you should get yourself some Hedningarna. Especially their 1994 album Tra.

If you can fix it that quickly, you're probably not a moron. Thank you! It works fine now - if a bit slow, but that's probably just my connection.

Before you leave, could you check why my blog URL, http://rocr.xepher.net/movetype2/mt.cgi, is spitting out perl code instead of rendered web pages for the blog backend?

So how do you make Movable Type use SMTP? It appears to be completely dependent on sendmail for password recovery.

Er, sure. Give me some time though.

Seconded!

Right.
My new password.
You know, I knew that was going to happen, and I even wrote the new password down. So now all I need to do is remember where I wrote it down.

Thanks - see my update to my original post. Neither PHP nor Perl seem to be working - I can see the static output from Movable Type, but can't use the Perl backend scripts.

Xepher, my site shows up again, but it shows the state of the website as of December, 2006. Will the newer stuff be transferred to the new machine, or is it lost?


Update: what it's showing is the Movable Type-based, static version of the site, which was last updated in December. The dynamic, PHP-driven version appears to be completely gone.

This is probably as good a time as any to mention that I'll have some money waiting for you when my first paycheck comes in. It's been a rough year for me but things are finally looking up.