Added a bloglet tool for email subscribers

Hattie was looking for a way to subscribe to my blog without having to proactively come to the site every day. I did a quick search and found that there is a service called bloglet (http://www.bloglet.com/) that allows people to subscribe to blogs. So I set it up on the main Hypercritical blog in the template and it will be all over it the next time I go to republish the whole thing. I'll put a new one into this one today.

I personally am a little worried about sending out drafts with errors in them but people can always delete the emails if they don't like them.

Moved to Net Firms

Well I started looking into the cost to host my large image collection and realized that the deal with Hurricane Electric was $9.95 per month for 100Meg of storage. Robert was hosting at Net Firms and they offer a deal which is $9.94 per month for 1 Gig of storage. Now this is still absolutely not enough disk space to store the mini movies that my camera creates. Actually I could theoretically buy a card that would store 1 Gig for under $100 in less than six months. But ten times the volume is a good improvement and all those die hard Dan Housman.com fans who need to see the videos will have to wait until I have found a good location for the videos or they will actually have to come to my apartment and watch them on my home computer or ask me to FTP them to you which is probably faster.

Now the experience was a little tricky. In order to switch from one provider to another you have to point DNS from one server to the other. You also have to move things that are on one server to the other. The first item proved difficult because my domain was apparently "domain locked" when I went to move the site to Net Firms after signing-up. So I tried to figure out what to do and I asked the Net Firms customer support folks who directed me to customer support folks at a company called register.com. The people there had to confirm some details and then emailed me a password to a site where I could change the DNS.

Before changing the DNS I decided to move the blogs to the new server. This was good and bad. What I discovered was that my super-cool SSI hack at HE didn't work at Net Firms. It was pretty easy to point the blogs to the other server. I just had to edit all the home directories from public_html/ to www/. With a little trial and error I had it working fine for this test blog. Apparently Net Firms requires that any page with SSI code in it must have the extension .shtml. This may make it hard to use SSIs in blog page templates. It also doesn't allow for CGI scripting inside of SSIs which also is a bit of a pain. I then moved the real blog over.

So I switched over the DNS names and bingo after about thirty minutes danhousman.com was the site on net firms. Pretty amazing that it was that fast since they warned that it could take 72 hours. Now I just need to cancel service on Hurricane Electric.