Married In Ohio » Technical Difficulties

I Hate Blogger!

Midwestern City Boy — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 04:05:55 +0000

I HATE Blogger! It was only a few months ago that I was complaining that Google changed the way that OpenID works for leaving authenticated comments. They changed things again on Sunday or Monday so once again I couldn’t leave comments on anyone’s Blogger blog. Of course they never announce their changes beforehand or even say what they changed; so the only way to know is that things suddenly stop working. It takes a lot of trial and error to figure out what changed and implement a fix. I know that its “free” but it’s becoming more and more troublesome of you use another blogging platform.

Things are finally fixed now so I’ve returned to normally scheduled programming. That means our HNT post will be published shortly.

One Of Those Days

Midwestern City Boy — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 23:50:27 +0000

As many of you know, I take care of things around MariredInOhio.com myself. It’s usually not a problem being your own system administrator except when you spend all evening trying to fix a problem with your mail server; only to discover that it’s actual a problem on the receiving system. Monday was one of those days. Email was/is a great innovation. But problems are very difficult to diagnose because of all of the servers involved. It’s all fixed now; but I’d much rather have been doing something a lot more fun.

We received everything. It was only replies in certain situations that were not being delivered. So, if you sent us an email recently and haven’t yet received a response, look for a reply very soon.

2009 A Year In Review

Midwestern City Boy — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 01:30:01 +0000

January
Did a lot of tinkering with the number of posts on the front page to speed up page load times. Finally I wrote a plugin that shows all posts published in the last seven days on the home page.
Created and published our favorite HNT photo post of the year.

February
Got California Girl a nice skirt and blouse set for her birthday.

Neglected to mention that Married In Ohio celebrated its fourth anniversary.
Survived one of those good news, bad news situations where the “good news” was that the bad news wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

March
Went over 2,000,000 Visitors which is a lot for us.
Created and published one of our favorite Two For Tuesday photo posts of the year.

April
Created and published our favorite HNT video post of the year.
Updated our theme to support threaded comments.
Posted a true click through HNT.

May
Posted our version of Jack Dawson and Rose DeWitt Bukater on the Titanic.

Celebrated our 21st wedding anniversary by going to dinner at our favorite restaurant.

June
Reminisced about the days that we used to watch us having sex in the mirror.

Had some good pool weather for one of the few times this past summer.

July
Posted a video edition of our Independence Day Sex series.

[Video]

Posted a Digital Photo Frame with all of the TFT photographs from 2008.

Get Adobe Flash player to see this video.

August
The Girl passed her driver examination and got her driver’s license.
I weighed 164 pounds on the scale at the doctor’s office.

September
Repaired the car that The Girl drives after it dropped dead and smoke started coming form underneath the hood.
Visited a college with The Girl. Realized how close we are to becoming “empty nesters”.

October
Had a LOT of problems after upgrading our server to PHP 5.3. The upgrade also broke our OpenId sever too.
Started working on the project from hell at work. It’s still radioactive.

November
Added a visitor map to the blog that showed where their visitors were from. Check it out in the sidebar just below the local weather.
Took some fun photos of California Girl changing one of the spotlights in the kitchen

Posted one of my one of my favorite photographs of California Girl for the week of Thanksgiving’s HNT.

December
Published an illustrated post explaining our “bedcam”setup”.

Got a new HDTV to replace our olds one which started smoking and had a burning electrical smell.
Created and published the fourth edition of our Christmas Vacation Sexseries.

More Surfing, Less Tinkering

Midwestern City Boy — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 03:45:45 +0000

I won’t know for sure until Sunday or Monday but I think I have finally fixed the server software issue that was intermittently causing Married In Ohio to crash. I’m sure that I have found the root cause; however, I won’t know until we don’t have any crashes for a while that my solution corrects the problem. It seems like I have been working on it forever; but it’s actually only been a week. If indeed it is fixed, I should be able to do more surfing and less tinkering in the coming days.

A Rocky Upgrade – Part II

Midwestern City Boy — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 03:25:26 +0000

You may have noticed that I haven’t been commenting much on everyone’s blog recently. That’s for two reasons. Firstly, our OpenId server was broken after the most recent upgrade so I couldn’t; comment on Blogger blogs that don’t allow anonymous comments. And secondly, the server which hosts Married In Ohio has been intermittently crashing. So, I’ve been busy trying to fix things. I’ve resolved the first issue; but the solution second one continues to elude me. The server restarts automatically so hopefully it hasn’t been too much of a nuisance for everyone. I’ve got some possible ideas; but it’s taking a long time to work though everything. I’d much rather be spending time with California Girl; especially when she’s waiting for me like this.

A Rocky Upgrade

Midwestern City Boy — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 03:50:12 +0000

I upgraded to the latest version of PHP (5.3) today. Unfortunately it did not go as smoothly as planned. Something strange happened earlier this evening and the blog went outline. I was drowning my sorrows over the Bengals’ loss so I didn’t notice until just a few minutes ago. It was a PIA to upgrade so I’m not going to undo the upgrade. I just hope that it doesn’t happen again. Or that if it does that I notice sooner than I did today.

P.S. I’d rather have a long snapper who misses the holder in victory than one who hits him in the hand in a loss. He deserved it but it was bad karma to cut the long snapper after a victory.

Down For Maintenance

Midwestern City Boy — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 04:00:08 +0000

Married In Ohio will be down for maintenance starting at 8:45 A.M. on Tuesday. I’m going to replace the hardware that malfunctioned this past weekend. I expect the outage to last for 45 minutes or so; but there is a slight chance that it could take longer than expected to get everything reconfigured. I apologize for the short notice; but I don’t like to put things off once they become a major annoyance. I’ll update this post when we are back online or if anything changes.

Update: Everything went smothly and we are back online.

Hardware Malfunction

Midwestern City Boy — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 01:00:05 +0000

We experienced a hardware malfunction on Saturday afternoon that was not fixed until 4PM. So, we were unreachable for almost 24 hours. I know this sort of thing happens; but we always seem to have network problems when tech support (me) is unavailable. (It doesn’t happen that way every time; but it’s not memorable/noticeable if it gets fixed right away.) Anyway, I apologize for the unscheduled downtime. We had a great weekend while we were enjoying our blissful ignorance. Sometimes it’s good to get away from things even if we’re still on the grid. Hopefully we won’t have any problems the next time.

Not Forgotten, Part 2

Midwestern City Boy — Sat, 30 May 2009 03:00:39 +0000

I’ve haven’t been blogging much recently because I’ve been spend most of my spare time “fixing” the OpenID provider that I use. Fixing is in quotes because it worked everywhere except Blogger which, unfortunately, is where I use my identity the most. Google made several changes underneath the covers that altered the way people who don’t have a Google account were authenticated. It’s their service and they can do whatever they want; but it would have been much easier for me if they had published the changes somewhere. As it was, I had to figure out what they did through trial and error which was extremely frustrating. Anyway, once again, I can comment on everyone’s blog. So, look for a flood of comments from me this weekend.

BTW: I’m not sure that it matters much; but, since I was making changes, I have also added the capability for people to leave comments here on this site using their OpenID. I haven’t updated the template yet; but you don’t have to enter your name or email address if you use your OpenID since that is sent automagically by your provider.

Not Forgotten

Midwestern City Boy — Sat, 23 May 2009 01:05:11 +0000

Some of you may have noticed that I haven’t been laving as many comments recently. I didn’t I stop reading everyone’s blogs. I just can’t comment when I’m using OpenID to authenticate. If you are on blogger and have the “Who Can Comment” option set to “Anyone” then you probably haven’t noticed any difference except the icon next to “Midwestern City Boy” changed. But, if you are on blogger and have the “Who Can Comment” option set to “Registered Users” then I haven’t been able to leave comments since Tuesday. It may have worked on Wednesday since I was offline; but it definitely wasn’t working today or yesterday.

It’s almost impossible to get anything operated by Google fixed since it takes days of complaining for them to notice and there is no good way to report bugs. If something is really broken, they are the last to know since their “help” just directs users to useless web pages which don’t address the problem. I know it’s free; but they have non-existent customer support. I’ve posted and emailed and have yet to even receive an acknowledgement. We have fewer problems with our self-hosted WordPress blog despite the limited hours of operation of the “help desk”.

I hope that it gets fixed soon. But if it doesn’t, I haven’t forgotten you.