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 You should just skip reading this blog entry if you're not interested in the "why" of this new website....
Back in about about October of 2006, I smartly installed a feature in the BismarckDems.com blog that I thought was going to make it much better. After installing it I had some problems with it so decided to uninstall it. Normally, uninstalling features on these websites is amazingly straight forward. Unfortunately, uninstalling this particular feature was not straight-forward at all. I don't know what happened, but I'm pretty sure I did the uninstall incorrectly. Whatever happened, I messed up the guts of the website, and it's been crashing about once per day since that day. You may have noticed. Earlier this week I had a "brilliant" idea for how to fix the crashing problem. I tried it, it didn't work, and the problems I'd had before got much worse. It took me quite a while to get the site working at all, and when I got it working, several of the standard features weren't working. Some were in the foreground (like the little weather thing I had and the "chat," "who's online" and stats features that were only available to people with higher credentials), but some were important things that kept the background stuff working. Why abandon the old site? I'm obviously not a brilliant computer programmer or IT specialist. I don't know how to fix the old site. Given that, I decided to do the only thing I know how to do: start a brand new site from scratch. I registered the domain name "NorthDecoder.com" on Monday after work and set the site up Monday evening. I'm hosting it on my own personal computer in a secret, undisclosed location (near Dick Cheney). Total cost to me? About $9 per year for the domain name. That's all. It's easy and cheap and an excellent example of why most corporate shill Republicans feel as they do about net neutrality. What you're looking at now -- this website -- has less than a dollar a month in overhead. That's what scares Republicans. Anybody -- and I truly mean anybody -- can do this from the comfort of their own home for less than $1 per month (not factoring in time). If your site gets big enough, you might need to upgrade your computer. Otherwise... a buck a month or less. I fully expect the old blog will continue to crash once a day. I also expect I won't be monitoring it. If you happen to notice it's down, feel free to send an e-mail to me at editor at -- or, preferably, @ -- northdecoder.com and I'll get it running again as soon as I have some time and can get to a web connected computer. If you're trying to get to something on there and it's down for a few days, you'll know why. Eventually I'll probably let that domain name lapse or give/sell the name to someone. (click "Read more..." to read the rest)
******* Okay. So where do we stand today? I have not transferred any of the content from the old blog to this blog. If there were an easy and free way to do it that I was confident wouldn't bring that blogs problems to this blog, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I could move it all by copying and pasting one article at a time, but I don't have the kind of "free time" it would take to do that. (There are something like 800 total posts over there. Any volunteers?) I may, however, grab a few of my favorite old articles and copy them over here so they don't get lost forever. Or I might ask you folks to nominate a "top 10" or "top 20" (or whatever) list of old articles to move here. That wouldn't take too much time to do. But 800? No way. The same is true about the login/user information and -- unfortunately -- the information in the forums. That's all gone. (Well... not really. It's still over at the old site.) If you want to protect/reserve your old user name from being used by someone else here, you should register ASAP. Once you've registered, nobody else can post comments using that name. If you are someone who used to use a particular username and now someone else has registered it out from under you, send me a note and we'll straighten it out. If I had given you special credentials over there (to see the "top secret" content), you'll get those here as soon as I see that you've registered. I don't now what to do about the forums. KeepAskingWhy put a lot of time into a lot of stuff in there. I hate to just let it go. But I don't know what else to do. This new blog is a work-in-progress. It's slowing falling into place but it's not where I want it to be just yet. There are some things this one can do -- from a webmaster's perspective -- that the other one couldn't do. I'm pretty happy about that. You may have noticed I'm messing around with a new kind of weather thing. I'm not sure what I think of that thing yet. (Comments?) There are also a lot of features and links waiting to be added. Some are already there but just need to be turned on and/or fine tuned and made available to the public. I'm still working on the "contact us" link. I need to spam protect that. Etc., etc., etc. I intend to try to get most or all of the features and links on the old blog onto this blog. And then some. That's going to take a while. I'll also be working on content. Lots to do. I appreciate your patience and understanding.
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