The old server will be shut down within the next 30 days. Anyone who has not spoken with me about moving your files to the new server has until that time to backup their files and blogs. Once the old server has been shut down, all of your files will be lost forever unless you or I have moved them to the new server, or have otherwise saved them.
That applies to two people. Plan accordingly.
Still making changes to the site. I managed to get the white background on the frontpage changed. You will note that the color scheme of the blog is coming together into some coherence, and even matches the old color scheme. I am now going to work on the individual post issues, look into “previous” and “next” buttons, changing the text color of embedded links, and some other changes.
I know the blog has been looking like it was nuked. It wasn’t. What happened was that I got screwed by the IT guy that was my partner in the server venture.
Back when Biden first took office and the left was cancelling voices on the right, I was approached by an Internet guy with a business proposition. His proposal was that I rent some space on a server that he had in Europe, and share the cost with other like minded bloggers. He offered to run the entire thing for me, where I would pay him and then share the costs with those other bloggers. I went with his plan, and have been paying him ever since. For now, we will call him IT guy.
There are people who have shared my server with me. Some, like BCE, since the beginning of the new server, while others have done so at various points since then.
All went well until about two months ago, when another blogger wanted to move his blog to my server. He paid me for a year in advance. I contacted the IT guy and asked him to set up the migration. A month went by. No action.
Eventually, IT guy stopped responding to emails, so I tried calling his cell phone. He told me how busy he was, and said he would get to the migration that afternoon. It still didn’t get done.
Then BCE’s blog got nuked, so he asked me to bring his backup site from its slumber and reset the password. You guessed it, no response from my emails to IT guy, and IT guy is no longer answering my calls, nor is he returning voicemail messages or emails.
At first I thought he was ill. Nope. Not to busy to cash checks or post to his blog. I paid him on a quarterly basis, and he cashed the last check on October 3 without a word about why he wasn’t doing what he was charging me for.
So I began looking to migrate my blog over to a new server. I had to learn how to run the server and do all of the Internet geeky stuff myself, all while my grandson was in the hospital and a lot of other stuff that had higher priorities. Something had to give, and that was sleep. I’ve been getting less than four of hours a night of sleep as I rented some server space in Europe, set up a multi-site server, along with a private email service, SSL certificates, and all of the rest. I am determined that no one will shut down my voice until I feel that there is nothing left to say.
There were some technical hiccups. That’s why the blog looked like it had been nuked. I contacted the other bloggers who were sharing the server, and all but two of them have been migrated to the new server. The other two have yet to answer my attempts to get ahold of them. I don’t know how long the old server will continue to be functional. Once it gets shut down, their content will be lost forever.
The new server is actually better than the old one. More memory, more processing power, more storage space and a lot more bandwidth. This situation won’t happen again because this time I am in control of the entire thing.
I’m not posting IT guy’s identity just yet, because I am giving him a bit of the benefit of the doubt. I am not going to accuse someone of taking my money and ripping me off, mostly because I don’t know for sure what is going on. I wish him well with his own blog and his endeavors.
With the new server comes some style changes. I am tweaking the look of the blog. Please bear with me, and let me know of any problems. I am working on readability and appearance. You will note that the text/background contrast has improved. I will continue to work on things.
I know the blog is showing a sample page. That is because I am rebuilding it. For now, you can still access the blog at sectorocho.com
I will explain the issues in a future post, coming soon.
There is a lot of research I would like to do, but I am having internet issues. The hurricane appears to be causing all sorts of connection issues and has been for days. My connection for Internet and cable television is best described as intermittent. It works for about ten minutes at a time, then goes down for a while, then back up. So posting quality may suffer a bit.
Thanks to a troll who continues to spam the comments of my posts, comment moderation is now in effect for this entire blog for an indefinite amount of time, effective immediately.
All comments will need to be approved before they will appear on the blog. I am looking at the possibility of requiring registration in order to comment. There will be no charge for registration, but should I take this step, a name and a valid email address will be required. I spend too much valuable time on this blog as it is, and I simply don’t have the time to babysit the comments to prevent trolls.
I don’t do paywalls. When I see a news outlet or story that is behind a paywall, I simply don’t read it. The same information or opinion, or one just like it, is likely to appear somewhere else. It is rare for me to see online information that is worth paying for, unless that information is directly related to my profession or business.
With that in mind, I have been seeing that there is a trend for bloggers to put their blogs behind a paywall. I just won’t do that. I actually began the server with the idea that I have some things that I would like to say, and I felt that others might like to read them. I am not looking to make money, so I won’t accept any paid advertisements, nor will I put this blog behind a paywall. You will also note that I keep moderation to a minimum.
I also knew that a blog isn’t very resource intensive, but resources cost money. Running an offshore server isn’t cheap. That is how the idea of sharing a server came to me. Bloggers need to have a space that is protected from censorship while being affordable. Blogs can share a server, splitting the costs, and making it affordable to have a voice.
So I began to offer server space to anyone who would like to have their own blog, which would allow blogs to be free speech zones. Anyone who shares server space with this blog has little worry that they will be censored for what they say. The only rule that I have is: no porn sites. I am not interested in having porn on my site for two reasons: they are resource hogs (both storage space and bandwidth) and I don’t feel like having to expend my own time and energy defending porn distributors.
With that being said, you can have your own blog space on this server for the affordable price of $25 per month, payable on a quarterly or monthly basis. There are a few ways we can make this happen, and there are a number of bloggers who happily have taken me up on this offer.
Even if you don’t contact me, find an alternative server now, or your blogs and podcasts may be gone forever. An XML backup is no longer sufficient, as Blogger and WordPress no longer support migration by XML. If your blog is cancelled, there may be no way to recover it.