Wanderings

You may have noticed that the blog was down for a little while this morning.

My hosting company, 1and1.com, asked me to upgrade my sites to a new version of PHP. Little did I know that it would break WordPress and my blogs.

I did the upgrade and tested my http://www.blogseye.com site and it worked great. I didn’t think about this further, but then someone emailed me that one of my other sites was down and unable to connect to the database.

I reset the PHP version and everything now works.

The reason that blogseye.com worked is that I use the WordPress beta versions; what are called “bleeding edge nightlies”. I was running the 3.5 version of WordPress and it worked well with the new PHP version.

I hope that this is all fixed by the time my hosting company gets rid of the old (and working) version of PHP.

I hate this stuff. A new version should not break old stuff.

In a similar vein, I bought a disk storage box. I can fill it with disk drives from an older server that died. I figured that I could utilize the disks and keep movies and music on them. This is an older box that I got for just a few dollars, but it runs Linux. All I have to do is plug it into the network and I get a new server with disk space that I can access from any computer. The very cool part is that it also has a web server built in with PHP and a MySQL database. I can use this for testing programs. This is handy, especially if I retire and work at home on consulting jobs. I am wondering which version of PHP it will be running and how I can upgrade it. I am looking forward to playing with it.

I looked into making this web server a host for some of my sites, but Optimum charges $15 a month for Optimum boost, a requirement for running a web site at home. If I made $15 a month from programming, I could justify this and as it is, hosting costs me about $15 a month, but this is a bit of a leap that I am not willing to make, yet. Optimum boost is somewhat faster than vanilla cable internet.