Skyzyx.com Is Temporarily Down | Nevermind

Nobody freak out! My primary domain, Skyzyx.com, is temporarily down while I switch webhosts. Service should only be down for a few days at most, so if there’s something hosted on that domain that you’re looking for, it should all be back up shortly.

« Update » It’s back up again. Move along. There’s nothing to see here.

My Move To Services

If you’re seeing this in your feed reader, it means that the feed switchover worked without a hitch. I got all of the redirection worked out for both my weblog, as well as my sidebar links. Glad to still have you all around.

While doing this, I utilized two services: FeedBurner and del.icio.us. I think that at this point, most bloggers know what del.icio.us is. It’s a way to bookmark things, and share them around. I’ve begun using this service in place of my normal bookmark functionality and it makes it infinitely easier to keep my bookmarks synced between multiple computers. I’ve actually got a fairly large dump of bookmarks that will be going into del.icio.us in a day or two. It took a while to get my old sidebar links into it, but now everything is peachy.

FeedBurner is a service that allows you to track how many people are reading your site, and also provides statistical analysis of things like user-agents (what application or service is being used to read your feed) as well as things like time-of-day pulls and such. There’s a free and a pay version. I’m using the free one right now, and at the moment, it’s all I need.

One thing that I absolutely hate is when someone changes the URL of their feed and either doesn’t say anything (really bad), or posts a message that says “hey, I changed my feed URL to this… update your bookmarks” or whatever (bad, but not as bad). I was guilty of this at one point long ago, but I never wanted to do this to anyone ever again because of how much it bothers me. So, Apache 301 redirects were the solution. If your service or feed reader supports 301 redirects, you’ll be in good shape whenever the old feed address finally goes away.

Of course it only bothers me, because I have to switch away from my feed reader to go login to Bloglines, then delete the old entry, and re-add the new entry. Then, I have to go into each feed reader I have (Feed Demon on 2 computers and NetNewsWire on 1), delete the old feed, then pull down the new feed. It’d be much easier if I could get 2-way syncronization across multiple products and services… but hey, what can I do?

So there you have it. Both of the above-mentioned services are good, so I’d recommend looking into them. Hopefully I’ll soon have all of my pictures loaded into Flickr, and my redesigned site will have images from there, as well as my iTunes listening habits. Ooh… integration…

Welcome to Wordpress!

Welcome to Wordpress! This is my first posting on my new system, and it feels good to know that most of the hard part is over. I’ve decided to rename my blog “Flailing Wildly” because I think it fits me pretty well, and it sounds better than “Skyzyx.com”. I’m also wanting to move to something more professional sounding that covers any domain name I may want to have, so “Skyzyx.com” is now officially “Skyzyx Technologies”.

For those who don’t know, I started working on my website’s redesign about a year and a half ago. After several months of development, my hard drive fried, and I lost nearly everything. This was rather discouraging, and as such I didn’t get around to beginning development fresh until April-ish of this year. I got Wordpress installed (I love the 5 minute install), exported the then-current entries, and imported everything into Wordpress… no problems.

A huge part of this redesign is an overhaul of the information architecture. This site has grown far beyond what I had initially anticipated, and I was still using 2 year old IA. So, I began organizing my categories as much as possible, and placing posts in multiple categories, where appropriate. About 2 months ago, I started getting 500 errors in Movable Type. This had less to do with Movable Type, and more to do with a bug in the latest release of CPanel, which is what my other webhost uses (for now… I’m switching hosts for .com this month). Anyways, I couldn’t login anymore, which meant that I couldn’t export my posts from Movable Type anymore.

So last night I had an epiphany. Log onto my .com server, backup my Movable Type database, install Movable Type on my .net server, import the database backup, and use the MT interface to do a formal export, which I then imported back into Wordpress. The whole thing took about 15 minutes to accomplish, after spending the last two months frustrated over the whole thing.

Anyways, I’m moving Skyzyx.com to the same host that I have Skyzyx.net at: Dreamhost. Dreamhost is freakin’ awesome, and that’s all I have to say about that. Anyways, all of the content that is currently at Skyzyx.com will still exist once my dual-site strategy goes live. Skyzyx.com will be the home of all things professional: my resume, projects like SimplePie and Tarzan that could almost be considered “Products”, and things like Web Building Resources and such. Things that are a little more static, and don’t need to be updated as often. Skyzyx.net will be more personal and experimental in nature. This is where my weblog will live, along with experimental software, CVS repositories, etc. This is the plan today, anyways. Or I might simply have any address at Skyzyx.com redirect to the same files Skyzyx.net, or vice versa.

Anyways, I’m back. I was never dead, I was just trying to balance fixing my website, caring for my new son, and figuring out how to develop JSTL-based, Ajax-enabled portlets for Oracle Portal (at work). Things are coming along. Expect lots and lots and lots of changes while I get used to this Wordpress thing, figure out how to build my own design, and generally get this forever-old redesign out and ready to go.