The Fun Zone

I'm about to hit the "update" button for The Fun Zone's blog software. If all goes well, it will be a painless transition, and the only thing you'll notice is things looking funny for a while (my custom layout, or "skin," is not directly compatible with the new version, so I'll have to rebuild it from scratch). If things don't go well, you may not hear from me for a few days. Weeks even.

Tell my family I love them.

UPDATE: At 10:23 on Friday night, after returning from a Mold Monkies concert, I think I've got things running smoothly. Functionality is a bit different in the new version, and I think I'll be fiddling with the aesthetics for a while. For now, enjoy the change of venue as you travel from blog to blog.

Sorry about the outage there. Looks like it was some sort of SQL data issue at the ISP. Thanks to those of you who let me know there was a problem. I had such a crazy week last week that I probably wouldn't have noticed things were screwy.

Anyway, things seem back to normal at the moment. Fingers crossed...

So, with all of the business going on lately, I didn't notice right away that things were looking a bit screwy around here. Comments were appearing where they weren't supposed to, strange characters started showing up, and some of my back-office functions were no longer working. It was probably a corrupt file around somewhere, but rather than just reinstall the same version, it seemed like a good time to upgrade b2evolution.

So, I'm up and running with the new software, but it'll take me a bit to sync my custom skin with the new version. I don't want to just slap it on, 'cause I may lose some of the upgraded functionality. That may have to wait for the weekend. For now, maybe I'll try out a new look.

UPDATE: Ah, couldn't wait. I just slapped the old skin back on. The only thing I don't think crossed over is the nifty new b2evolution logo, but I'm willing to live with that. If anything doesn't work for you, please let me know.

So, my ISP was bugging me to upgrade my installation of the blog software, so I did, but when I tried to import my display template, it broke the blog. So, we're dealing with a more subdued Fun Zone for the time being. Don't worry! The content will remain at the level it's always been (mediocre and irrelevant).

There are probably some new bells and whistles to explore. Let me know if you run into any problems.

EDIT-I think I have most of the Zone looking normal again. I still need to figure out how to bring back the "THEFUNZON" banners on the side, and there are a couple more settings I need to track down the toggles for, but at least things are working.

It's funny how quickly time flies when you're having fun.

So, when I registered EricSummerer.com, I did it for two years. It seemed like a good number. I was just starting out, with limited funds, and it seemed like a good place to save some money. Besides, two years seemed so far away.

Well, I forgot about it. Any notes that I left for myself were lost to time, and my registrar didn't remind me. My DNS registration had expired a few days ago, and had apparently been snatched up by a bulk reseller. You can imagine my panic as my entire online business and personal identity was suddenly swiped out from under my feet. Not a happy day.

Fortunately, as far as I understand what I've read online, the original registrar has 30 days from the expiration of the registration to renew it. So, once I submitted my renewal payment (for 10 years this time, dammit), things fell back into place. Either that, or this "bulk reseller" was actually my registrar in disguise. Or, my ISP just paid off the new guy.

Whatever happened, everything seems to be back to normal now, although I may have lost some e-mail messages to the digital ether. More importantly, I've learned a valuable lesson: if you own a domain, be darn sure when you need to renew it. This could have been a major disaster.

So, I found out today that my domain expired, and it's been snatched by some bulk reseller. The Fun Zone seems to still be up for now, but I'm not sure for how long. My e-mail's out, and I'm not sure how quickly I can get things up and running again (or how much it's going to cost me). Bear with me while I wade out of this mess.

I finally got around to doing a full update of the b2evolution software (actually, my ISP finally got around to adding an internal upgrade link to my site management panel), so The Fun Zone should be running on the latest version at this point.

One noticeable change is the removal of the publicly viewable statistics page. That's right. The Steve works alone now. In theory, this will make my little corner of cyberspace a little less tasty for those comment spam vultures.

What that does mean, however, is that there may be other functions of The Fun Zone's "skin" (which was designed under the old version and just pasted on the new) that may no longer work. I may do a side-by-side comparison of the old and new display files in the future, but for now, if you find something that doesn't work right, let me know, and I'll try to patch it as best I can.

When I checked my e-mail today, I found about 750 messages telling me that people had posted comments on The Fun Zone. It would appear that somebody got a complete list of every post I've put up since March of '05, and posted from 2-7 comments on all of them overnight.

Now, this happens from time to time, as somebody tries to boost their search engine ranking by posting their URL all over my site. The blog software has some nice tools for removing these messages if they all use the same URL. That keyword gets banned, and future comments from that location don't show up.

The problem with this attack was that they didn't use any URLs. It wasn't going to raise the stats for their website. It was a completely pointless attack, except to piss me off, for I actually had to go into every single post, delete the comments, and close commenting for the future. It's taken me all day.

I've heard that the new version of b2evoltion has some better anti-spam techniques, but I'm afraid to attempt an upgrade. It's probably time for some research...

I've had to disable comments on a few older posts due to some random and unblockable comment spam. Looks like they grab on to a few specific pages and flood them with meaningless drivel.

At any rate, sorry for the inconvenience. If you really want to comment publicly on something that's locked, drop me an e-mail and I'll unlock it for you.

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