Sunday 23 September 2007

Pic of the day: "It has been a while since I last wrote a long journal entry." How about you, dear reader?
(Screenshot from anime Lucky*Star.)

Uploads, layout, announces

Over the past year and more, there has been a recurring problem with Dreamhost.com where I have the Chaos Node. It is an excellent service and rather reasonably priced, at least by Norwegian standards. But when I upload with FTP, it is very common that nothing happens. It tries for a long, long time, then times out completely. At that time it may have uploaded a part of the file, but not all. Other days it work perfectly. Over the last year the proportions of "work perfectly" has dropped to far less than half. It often takes longer to upload an entry via FTP than it took to write it. This even applies to medium length entries.

I have complained about this twice to Dreamhost. The first time it turned out that I had the firewall on my router set wrong, so it blocked FTP. That was humiliating, but the problem had persisted long before this change. During the "long before" it worked some days and some days not, and I only contacted them about it when it no longer worked any days. The second time I checked with traceroute first and saw that the delay was moderate. They fixed it, without ever telling me what it was. A few weeks later it was back, as bad as before.

Right about now I found out that I can use web upload and it does not have this delay. It is more clumsy but not dramatically so. This means I no longer feel the same excuse to play Sims 2 and City of Heroes while waiting for my journal to upload...

Unfortunately, by the time I found out, my journal was already almost a month delayed. I have come to accept delays rather than inserting lots of "fast forward", but I am not sure if this is a good thing. NaNoWriMo is coming. Well, it is still a month away. Actually it is more like two weeks away as I write this, but even so. If I decide to participate this year, there won't be much journal writing too. Also for good measure the moving of my workplace will probably commence around that time. So, there may be more "fast forward" soon.

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There is a small change of layout on the front page. I am starting to list the latest of each color separately. With a few exceptions, I think it is not the same people who are interested in gray and green entries. This is a bit sad since I am the same person, but most people don't have that kind of wingspan. Either you find my gray entries boring and pretentious or you find the green entries embarrassing and pitiful. This should make it easier to tell at a glance whether there is a new gray entry even if there are several green in between. Which there may well be. Same for most other colors. And remember, you can watch my recent diaries page and get a quick list of the latest entries, complete with color!

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Or you could subscribe to my announce list. Just send me a mail to that effect and I will add you. Very short and pointless entries will not be announced neither there nor on the front page, but will still show up in the Recent page. Still, it does sound convenient, don't you think? You can easily get a fake e-mail somewhere that redirects to your main mail, if you don't want me to know that you are the one stalking me. As long as the mail is valid, it's fine by me.