The site has been down this morning. For the first time (that I’m aware), I hit my bandwidth limit with Memset – thankfully, the limit resets tomorrow.

For testing reasons I have had website compression turned off for a while which hasn’t helped, and the new site design that I’m working on will help with a smaller footprint. None-the-less, as this site gets more interest, that bandwidth is going to be an issue.

So I emailed Memset and they got back to me within 22 minutes (impressive!). The problem, as I’ve mentioned before, is that I’m on a hosting package that they no longer provide and the most basic now available is aimed firmly at businesses. Although not too expensive at first sight, extras such as cPanel and phpMyAdmin are extra and bump up the price beyond my range.

But, you know, I don’t want to go elsewhere. Memset has been excellent to me.

Thankfully Nathan at Memset had a solution – moving up to another (erm, I assuming, still on their records but not officially available) package, the same as mine but with greater disk storage and double the bandwidth. Within an hour of spotting the problem, the site was back! I didn’t even have to pay anything up front – as I’d recently paid for 2 years of hosting up-front, he simply took it off that money and brought my renewal date forward.

Hats off to Memset!

You’d think I enjoyed dabbling with my WordPress theme and plugins wouldn’t you

Ok, yes, of course I do. It’s great fun.

The smiley above is one such change, as I updated my “smiley pack”. I’ve also introduced the calendar which you can see at the beginning of each post. The way to do this is relatively easy (assuming you know your CSS and a bit of PHP). At first I had an iPhone style background for it, but after a scourer of the ‘net, I came across this more suitable dark version. Very nice, and I chose a text colour to match (it was white before and looked obviously stuck over the top).

The menu at the top has recently changed, to include some popular categories, and the sidebar had a refresh a while ago.

And, thanks to Tony, I’ve now added footnotes¹.

Finally, I’ve settled into Twitter and am now happy to say what plugin I’m using for that! I kept swapping at first as I tried various Twitter plugins, all of which didn’t work quite how I wanted. I wanted two pieces of functionality – to be able to inform Twitter of a post and to be able to display my latest Twitter – and thought I’d have to have two plugins. In the end, though, I cam across Twitter Tools which does both and has all the functionality that I wanted. Perfect.

Not WordPress related, but whilst on the subject of Twitter, I also experimented with Firefox plugins – TwitterFox ended up the best of that bunch (I wanted a simple way to post Twitters from my browser, and one that didn’t fowl up through my works proxy and firewall).

However, as much as I’ve plugged into my blog, I’ve also taken out – there were quite a few functions that I simply wasn’t using. It’s also keeping this installation as lean as possible – thanks to the shoddy speed of my hosting I need all I can get. As soon as I can scrape some money together I’m off to Memset (yes, yes, I keep promising that I know).

1. and this is an example [↩]

After whinging in the ear of my host, Streamline.net (poor quality but, erm, cheap), they have moved my MySQL database to a different server – a better one, they say.

Well, they didn’t have to, so I have to thank them for that. Both this blog and the Copy+ site has been updated appropriately – time will tell if it will help.

Longer term it’s still my intention to move to Memset.