You suck, Yahoo. No wonder you’re becoming so irrelevant.

Here’s what I’ve been up to:

The cuddliest baby in the world

And I know lots of you probably thought I’d be blogging MORE when I had a cute baby to brag about. But I didn’t want to be one of those mommy-bloggers. Or admit that all I had to talk about was my kid. I want there to be more in my life. Not because being a mom isn’t the greatest thing ever. But because now that I’m a mom, especially, I want there to be more to me… so I have more to give him. And so with blogging every week comes an even bigger challenge: To have a life worth blogging about.

Some things I’d like to do:

• Reconnect with people away from the internet. Phone calls, face time… maybe even some old fashioned snail mail.
• Make my health a priority. Not just about losing weight, but finally go see my doctor about my stupid knees and find out what to do about them. My weight, my knees, random aches and pains… it’s stopping me from having the life that I want.
• Read more books, watch less TV.
• Get out of the house more. There is a beautiful world out there, folks. I want to explore it. Even if I’m only able to explore Utah right now… it’s a start.
• And finally, in what is perhaps the most interesting turn of events, I am going to school. Cosmetology School! It’s true. I’m probably starting in about a week. So that should make for some interesting posts (Yes, that is EXACTLY why I am going to school, it makes for interesting blog fodder).

So that’s it. Feel free to hold me accountable to any and all of these goals. Things need to change.

I also added a plugin to republish my activity from Twitter once a day. I use Twitter pretty much everyday to post quick notes about what I'm up to. I know we haven't been posting much around here lately (new baby, duh), so I though it'd be a good idea to have at least something new on a near-daily basis.

I had gotten a message on Friday that the hardware on which my virtual server resides had to be given an emergency reboot. I checked the websites I host and all was well. This morning I got another one, but nothing would load from my end. I immediately logged in to try and figure out what's going on. Oddly enough, Apache would not shut down gracefully, forcing me to use kill -9 to wipe its processes. Starting Apache again did not fix anything.

After some digging, I found that Apache was throwing a segfault when it started up. I groaned because I knew this meant a lot of fixing beyond my ability. I dropped a note to the hosting company to see if they could be any help and started trying to figure out what I could do about it. Unfortunately, everything I read pointed towards rebuilding Apache. Worse yet, I was still on the 2.0 branch and had long put off upgrading to the 2.2 branch.

I had been doing so because the config files from 2.0 do NOT work with 2.2 right out of the box and would require a lot of tinkering from my end. I'd spent several hours just getting a reliable WebDAV server on 2.0 and didn't want to know what it would take on 2.2 Nevertheless, I synced up Portage, backed up my /etc/apache2 folder and crossed my fingers as I ran "emerge apache". After about 20 minutes of compiling and 10 minutes of trying to interactively merge the config files, I threw my hands up in frustration and asked the hosting company to go ahead and move it to another piece of hardware around 11AM.

And so I waited. And waited. And waited some more. It wasn't done around 1PM and I had to leave to take Shauna for an ultrasound. When I got back around 3PM, it still wasn't up. We left for her brother's house around 5PM and it still wasn't up. We got home around 9:30PM and it was still down. I was pretty frustrated at this point and sent them an e-mail to figure out an ETA. After a few messages back-and-forth, they had it back up so I could try to get Apache to work again.

I had to spend about another 90 minutes getting Apache into a level of base functionality. I still can't use my WebDAV repository and I can't use the web-based mail admin program. Heck, I can't even get the mail admin program to install cleanly anymore. It's kind of messy, so expect the website to go down for a few seconds at a time over the next few days as I sort everything out and try and get that functionality back.

So what do I say about the hosting company, Slicehost? I'm certainly not happy that a simple reboot blew up Apache, though had I been more patient it may have started working on the other server. I'm also not happy that about 8 hours of my waiting was due to them forgetting to flip a virtual switch and send me a notification e-mail. That said, they immediately comped me for three months of hosting when I asked which was far above and beyond what I would expect them to do. This is also the first major issue I've had where there wasn't an immediate fix.

I'm very happy that they take customer service so seriously and have, this incident aside, provided great technical service. I still strongly recommend their service and have learned a few lessons on keeping packages up to date sooner rather than later.

The biggest roadblock was finding a workable platform. After playing around with WPAdmanager, it proved to be a total bust. The code was buggy, English was not the author's native language and I couldn't even figure out how to debug the thing myself. Enter WPTextAds. It has a very slick interface, an active support community and costs exactly zero dollars unless you need to go hog-wild with ads. I've only used it on a limited basis, but I'm certainly looking forward to seeing how it works out.

Certainly the biggest headaches involved in any new version of WordPress are theme and pluigin incompatibilities. The jump from 2.0.4 to 2.1.3 required us to find a new theme and upgrade almost all of our plugins to boot. The jump from 2.1.3 to 2.5 will require upgrading most of our plugins with some uncertainty as to how some of them will behave once the dust settles. I took advantage of this time to clean out a few we no longer used and caught a few potential compatibility issues. (I owe a big thanks to the excellent Upgrade Preflight plugin for making some recommendations.)

What does this mean for you? Not a lot… except for those of you still getting e-mail updates. If you've been getting e-mail updates from our site when we post new stuff, you'll need to re-subscribe with FeedBurner as soon as possible (the box is on the right) to continue to receive them. Why? Because, quite honestly, Subscribe2 hasn't really been fitting the bill. While using it over at FreeUTOPIA, I got reports of unsubscribe requests not being honored, duplicate or even triplicate deliver, strange formatting issues… a lot of stuff that I really didn't have the time to fix. The newest version of Subscribe2 comes with a bunch of reports of bugs that I'm not going to deal with either. FeedBurner is a proven service with reliable delivery that consumes exactly zero server resources and causes no problems with spam filters.

If you don't switch over within about a week or so, I'll send out a reminder e-mail before I flip the swtich and send Subscribe2 into retirement. As part of the change, update e-mails will go out only once a day instead of each time we post; FeedBurner doesn't support any other kind of delivery frequency. This would be a great time to think about signing up for an RSS reader like Bloglines or Google Reader to keep track of what we're up to as we post it.

So why not switch the feeds to FeedBurner? Because you lose a vital part of WordPress' feed capabilities: feeds by category. I tried to use a plugin to emulate this functionality, but it didn't work right and would have required that I build a whopping 33 feeds, one for each category plus a main feed. Hopefully FeedBurner can think about adding this kind of functionality into their core.

So what about you, fellow WordPress users? Have you taken the plunge to 2.5 yet? Are you embarrassed to admit how old your version of WordPress really is? (It can't be worse than TimesandSeasons.org: they're still on 1.5.2!) Gimme some feedback.

Thing #Only:

• I don't do these things.

Sorry Frank. I've just never been into them.