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Apology to NJ Blogosphere

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Carnival of the NJ Bloggers
featured in Carnival of the New Jersey Bloggers #43

To the New Jersey Blogosphere,

I am sorry.

A month ago, I was preparing to host the 39th Carnival of the New Jersey Bloggers. Links were being sent in, I learned a little about Gmail, and I read more Garden State blogs than I knew existed. It was exciting.

The Saturday before was the one-year anniversary of the current version of eCache. The family and I had a good day and that evening I settled down to prepare the Carnival. It was a longer task than I expected, but somewhere around 2:30 Sunday morning, it was completed. I posted it, sent Enlighten an e-mail, and then retired.

I awoke, read the paper, watched FNS, and began checking out the blogosphere.

Then it happened. Sometime around noon, eCache went dark. Thus began an up-and-down, inconsistent, frustrating, pissed-off, unexplained, period of time that kept eCache offline for two weeks.

I still cannot accurately say what happened. It was not a database issue as the same database was easily viewable on other sub-domains (and still is). My former host, GISOL, lied to me numerous times. After banging my head for a week, I decided to take my business elsewhere. One of the things I contemplated was switching from e107 to WordPress. I wanted tagging and e107 was not able to accommodate that and there was no seeming interest to move in that direction. Nevertheless, when I finally got up and running with my new host (midPhase), I opted to re-mount e107 and save myself the frustration.

I learned about midPhase from researching WordPress. It is one of the recommended hosts from WP.org. I liked the package and after fighting with GISOL for control of my domain, ladow.net, eCache finally came back online. That was 15 days after I hosted the Carnival. 🙁

Not many people ever read the 39th edition. For that, I apologize. There were a lot of good posts that week. The New Jersey blogosphere was short-changed because of the troubles this site had.

All was running smoothly here until last weekend. I received an e-mail from a loyal reader indicating she had trouble accessing the site. Soon after, Enlighten sent me a similar e-mail. All looked fine to me . . . until I logged out. Arrrggghhhhhh!!!!!!

After a short bit, I determined it was the stats pack that I was running. e107’s stats never thrilled me and something went awry. I disabled it and the site came back . . .

. . . until the next day. I had great trouble logging in. I eventually was auto-banned from my own site. Grrrr . . . after hacking my way in, I decided enough was enough. I backed up everything, deleted e107, and installed WordPress.

I have never been happier with this blog.

Old links do not work. I have set up my re-directs to dump all links to the front page. I am sorry if you have to re-bookmark anything. We are using friendly urls this time around. Tagging is employed, And I finally am able to use Technorati the way I have wanted to for a long time. The RSS feed has changed . . . again. But all these changes should provide a better experience and make it easier to find content here. Please let me know if you experience any issues.

e107 never built a good export feature. As such, there is no easy way to transfer all the posts, etc. to WordPress. I decided I will re-enter everything by hand. It is going to be a loooooonnng process, but one I will be happy to complete. Currently, I am back to January, although many of these posts have links deep to former posts. I have been re-visiting those older posts and getting them back in as well. It is going to take a while to fully restore the site. Meanwhile, the commentary continues.

So, New Jersey bloggers, that is why I haven’t been around. I invite you all to visit the 39th edition of the Carnival. It is a good read.

All looks like it is going to be stable and I have dared to offer to host the Carnival again . . . this time on my birthday. Ha!

All the best,
Bob.

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