The move to Dreamhost is complete. Well…almost complete to be fair. The domain needs to be transferred, I need to cancel my old hosting, I need to … more technical boring stuff.
The most tricky part is behind me though. The words I write now are written on a back-end hosted at Dreamhost. And when you visit my blog online, the bits and bytes served to you originate from Dreamhost. Pretty ironic actually: my address is the same, but the physical location of my blog has changed by thousands of kilometers.
I’ll be doing more checks the coming days, and some tweaking alongside. If you notice anything that doesn’t work as expected, please visit the Contact page and let me know!
Last year was the first edition Blog Action Day. At the time the event was launched as an annual event. So this year they kept their word and Blog Action Day is back. This year the theme is Poverty. On October 15 bloggers, podcasters and videocaster from all over the world will unite and address the topic of poverty. Thousands of voices with a reach of millions talking about the topic from hundreds of different angles.
I have already signed up to participate again. This year I even took an hour of extra time, and translated a part of the site to Dutch. Read about Blog Action Day and sign up to participate.
Alltop
This week I got the confirmation that I kick ass! How to be an Original has been included in the GTD section of Alltop. It’s only the productivity / GTD feed that’s included and not the entire site, but that makes sure that there’s a good topical focus on Alltop.
Alltop is a new activity started by Guy Kawasaki a while back. Alltop shows the last five items of a selection of feeds, related to a specific topic. Go check out GTD on Alltop!
Switching hosts
I’ve thought about switching hosts for How to be an Original a while back, but I’ve finally made the decision to follow through on that thought. I’m switching for two reasons.
The first reason is that my current host causes downtime everyday! Around 1am the database server goes down, and since WordPress is a database driven application, the blog goes down as a result too. I rediscovered this phenomenon, ever since I switched back to being a night owl. The reason for this downtime is most likely a scheduled restart of the server. But 1 am might be okay for people in my timezone, but most visitors on How to be an Original are from North America and for them the downtime is during the afternoon and early evening. Not a good thing.
The second reason is simply financial. I’m consolidating various hosting plans and domain registrations to a single host. And it’s gonna save me a lot of money! I’ve chosen Dreamhost as my new host, and so far I’m liking it very much (only on board for two days…). Dreamhost has had their fair share of problems too, but I very much like the transparency they give on their operations (and troubles). And they have humor.
This week I’ll be moving this blog. I’m planning to make this a smooth transition, but switching hosts is challenging and there might be some glitches. There’s not going to be a new design, so you won’t notice what host you’re getting your data from. For the curious among you: if you see “hosted on Dreamhost” in the footer, you know where you’re getting your data from.
That’s it for now. Wish me luck…switching hosts is not quite my hobby.
In my last weekly review I promised that I would post about how working with the daily planning sheets turned out for me. But this post is going to be a really short one, because I’m about to leave on a ski trip.
I learned that they’re useful when I use them
I learned that they’re useful when I don’t use them (and wish I did)
I learned that there’s a discrepancy between planned available time and reality
I learned that some occurrences disrupt you’re planning to such an extent that you have to start all over
I learned that most of those occurrences are out of your control
I learned that the way you deal with those occurrences determines the extent of their effect
And I learned to leave room for the eventuality of such an occurrence in case of activities with deadlines
Rocket science? Hardly, but obviously something I had to go through before understanding. Next step is to master this skill.
But first holidays! I’ve got one post for scheduled for next week for you guys. I’ll be back with a regular weekly review on March 9.
If you did come from Zen Habits: Welcome to How to be an Original! My name is Lodewijk van den Broek and I’m the blogger of this place. In this short post I want to show you what you can find around here, just to get you started.
To describe How to be an Original in a nutshell: it’s about discovering who you are, deciding what you want from life and about learning how to get it. Now I don’t know all the answers to those questions as well, but I have quite some ideas and I’m experimenting with a lot of concepts. So this blog is as much about teaching and sharing as it is about learning. One of the features for instance is a weekly review post, in which I review my goals (among other things). If you check those reviews you will find that I learned a lot, because I made quite some mistakes.
For a tour of popular posts, you can check the popular posts section in the sidebar, or scroll all the way down and look through the popular posts menu there. In case you want to learn more about me (where my name comes from for instance), check the About page or leave me a message through the Contact page.
Don’t forget to subscribe to the feed if you like what you see!
Yesterday this domain has been abused by a spammer. Last evening my email box filled with over 3500 “Returned mail” messages for addresses that do not exist. This morning the count is at >7500 messages. I can’t even begin to imagine how many were delivered.
I don’t know if they abused the mailserver at my provider, or that they just used my domain as the (fake) return-address. I’ve submitted a support ticket at my provider, but I have to wait until the workday starts (in 3 hours) to get a response. I’ll update this message when I have more news.
For anyone visiting this site to check who sent them the junk email: I apologize for the inconvenience! I have nothing to do with those mails, please delete them at once! I sincerely regret that you were bothered by that email, as much as I regret that my domain was abused for this.
I’ll keep you posted.
[Update]
The servers at my provider Argeweb were not abused. The spammer only used my domain as a fictitious domain where the spam was coming from. Argeweb was so kind as to remove the catch all function from my account, so the remainder of the mail will bounce, instead of flooding my inbox (counter stopped at 8000 undeliverable mails). Not a lot more I can do but to delete all the messages.
