fatvegan

In lieu of the highly successful hacking of my previous server, I've decided to completely turn off FTP on sprint.footboot.net. I've updated SFTP (which is file transfer over the properly secure SSH) access for everyone with an account.

That's only really going to affect these folks:

• alicecommunitygarden.org.au
• wikileaks.org.au
• thirddegree.org.au
• riffraff.org.au
• ayni.footboot.net
• oma-fiets.com.au
• skymoney.org.au
• riverssos.org.au

You folks will have to use FileZilla or some such that supports SFTP. I've also installed SSH2 support into PHP so that WordPress will let you update it automatically from the admin area using your same login details.

Now we have gone back to one server. Everything has moved to sprint.footboot.net. The old sub.footboot.net got a little hacked two weeks back and had to be permanently shutdown. I've been restoring everything from backups on that server since then. That's mainly thoughtfulfoods.org.au, ksa.org.au, and a few blogs. I'm still sorting out a few things. There was some stuff on there which hasn't been looked at in maybe a decade.

After frustrations with Slicehost (crashing a lot and weird stuff happening) and discovering that the VirtualBlades VPS I got in March is hosted on a refurbished Atari and decided to move stuff somewhere better.

Now we are all on a happy New Zealand server with RimuHosting. From Australia latency is around 30ms (instead of 220ms from Slicehost) and the server is well speedy. Fingers crossed.

Sad times for the server. As always, whenever I get out of SSH range the smurf.footboot.net server decides to crash itself. This time it did it for about two solid weeks. 70% uptime for the last month. Oh dear. I haven't figured out why it was so unhappy. Perhaps it just missed me and was looking for attention. I feel like our relationship is a little up and down. Sometimes I do wonder if we'd both be happier without each other. But I doubt we'll separate. We've been two long together now I think.

I'll do a bit of an apt-get upgrade. Might make things better. Could make things worse. We will see. I'm going away for another two weeks on Friday. Poor old smurf.

I've disabled image hotlinking on the smurf server because I didn't know how to measure what bandwidth hotlinked images were consuming and I suspected they were using a lot. It shouldn't have any impact on anyone unless you're hotlinking images. If you don't know what hotlinking is, then you aren't doing it.

I have moved all the WordPress blogs to my new server at SliceHost. The server is called smurf. I don't think I screwed up the database or left it out of sync or forgot to change the permissions for images. But we will see.

If things are going wrong, it's probably not your fault.

People who have blogs on my server might not be able to get to them for a little while. I'm moving them to a better server.

Blogfeed now has it's own Atom Feed. Given that I just forgot (for a minute) how this post was different to my post a few days ago about Atom and Blogfeed, most of you will probably also wonder. Chris asked for this, but I'm certainly not convinced that it provides any value. Hopefully it does for Chris. At least I learnt about Atom.

Blogfeed is now Atom-enabled. SimplePie is approximately four billion times better than PEAR fricking XML Feed Parser. And after a brief romance, I've concluded that PHP date() is much, much better than PEAR Date. If only PEAR wasn't so neatly integrated and standardised I'd abandon it altogether.

If anyone is wondering what all this means, it is that Tom, Steve and Anmol can now all come to the Blogfeed party.

The VPS totally died while I was at the Blues Festival. It's running again now. It will probably happen again though. I suppose you get what you pay for.

Tom is missing from the Blogfeed. We apologise for any inconvenience or psychological harm.

Tom helpfully pointed out that Blogfeed dates were totally borked. I spent a fair while fixing them, and maybe I still haven't. Pear Date sure does suck arse. Timezones are awful horrid things. Quite a few people are an hour out still, but I'm pretty sure that's because they've put 10 in where 11 would have made a better timezone offset. Daylight saving is also a dog.

In the interests of saving the money of my old work, I've moved footboot.net to my flaky server. Currently it's at feed.footboot.net but that should change when I have a bit more time.

If you want WordPress to show more than 10 items in the RSS you can change it in Options > Reading.

I made some little changes to Blogfeed. It now shows the activity for all the non-Blogger folks. Hopefully readers will be more likely to go to the actual website when there are lots of new posts.

After some extended technical difficulties - me forgetting to uncomment Tom's config line - Tom is back on The Bog.

Tom - Just out of curiosity I'd be interested to see your Webstat graphs during your exile.

I've installed WordPress MU on my happy little server. So if any of those footboot.net folks languishing on Movable Type want to move their blogs you should let me know. If you want some theme it's easy to throw it in there too. There are heaps of good themes for WordPress.

I'm started renting a dandy server in America for $13 a month. It's pretty sweet. Full root access. 128MB ram. 5GB hard disk space. More bandwidth than you can poke a stick at. I moved this blog there yesterday, and it took all of about 10 minutes. I might move more important things there if all goes well.

One of the fun things is that you can install any of about 15 different Linux servers onto it with a little click. I've already been through two versions of Ubuntu and a version of Debian vanilla. I'm thinking I'll stick with Ubuntu Dapper now though. Seems pretty sweet. Lighttpd is finally in the repositories.

I've fixed up Blogfeed to use RSS. If someone doesn't have that then it can still do it the old way. But everyone seems to have RSS already. If your site is currently working on Blogfeed, then you can remove the old comments from your blog.

I made Blogfeed more pretty.

Update: Much thanks to those beautiful human beings at Alistapart.