State of the Union

Quite a few things happened to my blog in the last few weeks and Ive finally got everything patched up again.All about my blogs disapperance and reappearing right after the Jump!

It all started with Guy not beeing able to comment on my blog a few weeks ago.At first I thought that this might be a problem on Guys side since other Users were able to post comments without problems.Over the time more and more Users couldnt comment and it resulted that by the time I posted my Japanday 2010 post nobody was able to comment anymore.I backed up all my data (or atleast I thought so) and installed a spanking new wordpress because I expected this to be a database fault.

Much to my consternation the virgin wordpress still had the same issues as its predecessor and a few other installtions couldnt change this state.Thats where I contacted my Webhost Strato and asked them for advice.This proved to be a waste of my time since  after a few E-Mail exchanges they blamed the fault entirely on the Commenters and washed their hands in innocence.By a lucky turn of events Sephix opened up his Bloggers Corner which is a Forum for German Bloggers and I asked for advice there.It turned out that my whole dilemma is entirely Stratos fault because one of their Guest Book Spam protectors (which is turned on by default) is overloading the Server which is resulting in an Connection Error for the Users.

This is a well known compatibility problem between my host and wordpress and yet they blamed my users for their fault.

This is where I would have changed my host but unluckily my contract got prolonged for another 12 months shortly before everything went down the drain >.<

After turning off said Spam Protector the commenting worked  again and I started to upload my WordPress backup only to realize that the backup itself got corrupted because of the server overload and that it only saved posts until january 09.I guess you can imagine how you feel when so much of your work went down the drain….I was utterly depressed that evening but luckily Guy came to my aid and showed me how to recover those posts that were lost via Google Time Machine.I cant thank Guy enough for helping me out there.

This is for you Guy!

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Since I had to start from scrap again I decided that its the time for a theme change since my old theme, as much as I like it, was horribly incompatible with many plugins and would have probabyl blown up in half a year or so.I already knew which theme I was going to use since I was eyeing it for months but Ive been hestitant before because its a paid theme.Installing the theme was as smooth as a babys butt but still I encountered one problem: the Thumbnail System the Theme uses doesnt allow external image hosting and I would have to play around with the themes and plugins code.I am a complete klutz when it comes to the technical side of blogging but luckily meronpan came to my aid and helped me out big time.The Automatic Thumbnail Grabbing seems to work now in all instances except in the Gallery Section of the mainpage.I hope that this will be fixed soon as well.I cant thank you enough for helping me out either meronpan!

This is for you Meronpan! Cirno…sort of…in a way…

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After most issues were sorted out I added a few plugins to hopefully better the experience of my users.Theres now a smoother Spoiler button for my readers that are allergic to boobs,some social bookmarking crap and the chance to rate my blog posts.I know that that the latter one sounds very selfish but I want to actually know which posts are liked by my readers and which arent.I hope to get some feedback from readers that cant be othered to comment that way.Ill discard this feature if it proves to be food for trolls though.

The way the blog looks right now is going to be the final one except for a few things like a banner or Navigation/Categories.I am more than open to ideas and improvements that might have gone under my radar though.

I really hope that some of my readers are still among me and that we can venture into my blogs third year in July without any other mishaps.

I really appreciate the help I got from all the other bloggers that I didnt mention.Thank you Guys!

Ill try to restore my archives as soon as possible but this is manual labor and itll take some time until everythings back up.If there are any requests for special posts let me know and ill try to bring those back as soon as possible.

Thanks for sticking with me and helping out during hard times!

Service!Service! (If youre into a certain glutton)

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