I’ve had a couple of questions about how I create the sidebar to this blog, so thought that I’d document it here for posterity.

First of all, I use the sidebar widgets WordPress plugin from Automattic, and a widget-friendly theme. After doing this for one blog, I would never again use a theme that didn’t support sidebar widgets: this makes is unbelievably easy to create a sidebar without coding, or to use code for selected sections if you prefer. Basically, when activated, it replaces any sidebar code that’s already in the theme with what you specify in the Sidebar Widgets submenu (under the Presentation menu) in WordPress.

I added on a few third-party widgets that are available as plugins – a Google AdSense widget and a Bloglines widget — then either used the standard widgets or text widgets with my own code for things that there aren’t widgets for. It’s pretty easy to create your own widgets, which I might do for some of these to make it easier to use across the multiple blogs that I have.

I use a total of 13 widgets in the sidebar of this blog:

1. Search, which is the standard search widget. No parameters.
2. Text, title “My Photos”, containing a Flickr badge that shows one random photo from my photo collection. I started with the standard Flickr badge code then tweaked it until I liked how it looked. I didn’t like any of the Flickr widgets that I saw at the time.
3. Text, title “What I’m Reading”, containing a code snippet from LibraryThing to display the most recent book added to my collection, which is typically what I’m reading right now.
4. Categories, with the title left blank for the default, and “show post counts” checked.
5. Google AdSense, with the parameters copied from the code generated by Google for an ad of the same dimensions. This is really not any easier than using a text widget with a direct paste of the Google code.
6. My Bloglines Sub, with my Bloglines ID plus the name of the folder that I want displayed; this displays my blogroll for this blog, which is just a folder in my feed reader, hence does reflect what I’m actually reading. I use different Bloglines folders for the blogrolls on different blogs, and I have some feeds that are not displayed in any blogroll. This capability is one of the primary reasons that I love Bloglines as my feed reader.
7. Text, with the link to the Breast of Canada site. I met Sue Richards at BlogHer last year, and she gave me one of her fabulous calendars in exchange for a bit of publicity.
8. Recent Posts, standard widget with no parameters.
9. Archives, standard widget with the parameters left blank to default.
10. Links, standard widget with no parameters that picks up any Links that you have specified in WordPress (now called Blogroll from a top level menu since WP 2.1).
11. Text, containing links to my posts and comments feeds. I was going to include these in my Links but I don’t like the lack of control in links so just hacked the HTML directly in a text widget.
12. Text, containing my Upcoming.org events badge.
13. Text, containing my StatCounter and Google Analytics code to track visitors (I haven’t decided which I like best, so leave both in there). This is not visible on the page itself.

I haven’t taken a look at other available widgets lately, but it might be time to check them out and see if there’s anything new that I want to include here, or something that will take the place of one of my text/code widgets.

If you recently upgraded to WordPress 2.1.1, you might have a version of the code with a big security hole. WP recommends upgrading immediately to 2.1.2.

I totally blew my blogging wad this week: 15,000 words in four days, which is some sort of record for me. With the exception of the previous post here about the Salton Sea that I did right after the flight to San Diego, all of it was for the Gartner Business Process Management (BPM) summit that I was attending, so you’ll find it over on my business blog as well as some guest posts on another BPM blogging site.

It’s very strange, but in the little world of BPM, I’ve become a celebrity with the vendors through blogging. Vendors were clamoring to get meetings with me this week, in hopes that I’d write something about their products or just to get the relationship in place for when they want show me something new that they’re doing in the future. I was recognized at almost every vendor booth that I went to, and many people made a point of telling me that they were reading my live blogging to keep up with the sessions that they couldn’t attend.

With a proposal due today, Pat’s birthday dinner tonight and a bunch of other work to catch up on, I don’t expect to be blogging much for the next few days.

Okay, that sucked — you may have noticed that this blog has been down since late Sunday night, or showed my corporate website instead of the blog. I’m constantly amazed at the ways that domain registrars and hosting providers can screw things up; there’s always some new frustration. I’m documenting the whole story here for posterity — and maybe to help other people in the same position in the future — but if you’re not interested in technical details of domain transfers, move on.

It started around 2am Monday morning, when I couldn’t sleep and decided to start a project that I’ve been thinking of for a while: transferring my corporate domain, which includes my website and my primary email address, from Yahoo to GoDaddy. I love Yahoo’s webmail, but I’ve become frustrated with their implementation of MySQL and WordPress, which is anything but standard. I’ve been using GoDaddy for both this blog and my wine club site/blog for quite a while, and am happy with their registrar services, their hosting and their prices.

Easy peasy, right? Not so much. First, I go to Yahoo and unlock my domain — first step in starting any domain transfer. Then, over to GoDaddy and initiate the transfer. I get the email from GoDaddy with the Transaction ID and Security Code, pick up the Authorization Code from Yahoo’s domain management page for my site, and enter it all in on GoDaddy, which is supposed to be everything that I need to do, except wait. So I wait. Now, I’m a bit impatient about technology sometimes, but every domain transfer that I’ve ever done before has happened automatically, and therefore within an hour or two has switched over. Which means that I was a bit surprised to find that 12 hours after initiating the transfer, my domain was still sitting as a pending transfer in GoDaddy with a status of “Pending Current Registrar Approval”. Basically, that means that although I’ve initiated the transfer and provided all required approvals and security information to complete the transfer, the current registrar is sitting on the transfer.

Meanwhile, I replicated my corporate website on GoDaddy (which explains, in a roundabout way, why this blog was down — I’m hosting both under the same hosting account, and I wanted to make my corporate site the primary site, so had to relocate this domain as a secondary domain on the account, which takes some time) so that when the transfer finally came through it would be available, and I changed my MX records over on Yahoo to redirect my mail to a new mail account that I set up on GoDaddy for my corporate mail. Mail started arriving on GoDaddy instead of Yahoo, but still the domain transfer waited.

This morning, more than 24 hours after initiating the domain transfer, I called Yahoo technical support. “Walter” informed me that Yahoo is not the reseller of my domain (huh? then how come I paid Yahoo for my hosting/domain services?) but that I have to contact the registrar, Melbourne IT, directly — in Australia! Okay, this is starting to bite.

I went on Melbourne IT’s site and tried to their password recovery for my domain (which presumably would email a password to me as the domain’s contact), but was presented with:

Retrieval Failed

The Registry Key for Domain Name kemsleydesign.com was not able to be retrieved. This could be due to the Domain Name being managed by a Melbourne IT Reseller. Please contact your Reseller for assistance.

Hmmm. I went off to their help pages, then their contact pages and eventually found a customer service request form, where I tried to be as succinct as possible:

I am attempting to transfer my domain, kemsleydesign.com, from Melbourne IT to  GoDaddy, but it appears to be stuck in the status “Pending Current Registrar Approval”. I have entered the appropriate authorization code that should release the domain, but it has been in this status for more than 24 hours. Can you please confirm that this transfer is pending and will occur soon?

By this time, it’s midnight in Australia and (given the current state of things), I’m not expecting a real speedy answer, so I was impressed to receive a reply within the hour:

Subject: How to contact your domain manager for kemsleydesign.com

THIS IS A SYSTEM GENERATED MESSAGE

A Melbourne IT Reseller manages the domains specified in your message.

Please contact this reseller using the details below for any assistance you require. If the person you contact refers you back to us, ask them if they would please contact us on your behalf.

Reseller details:

Yahoo Inc.
Web address: domains.yahoo.com
Email address: domains-support@cc.yahoo-inc.com

If after 48 hours you have yet to obtain a satisfactory response:

FOR FURTHER ASSISTANCE FROM MELBOURNE IT YOU MUST REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE. TO ENABLE TRACKING OF YOUR REQUEST, DO NOT ALTER THE SUBJECT LINE OF THIS EMAIL.

Please provide us as much detail of any correspondence with the reseller which relates to this request.

Please note: In an effort to resolve this matter quickly we will notify the Reseller of this request including any details you have given us.

Kind Regards,
Melbourne IT Customer Support

——————————

The status of your case is now closed.

If you need to reopen this case with additional information, please reply to this email. If you need to contact Melbourne IT by phone please quote this case ID

Okay, someone is obviously confused: either Yahoo is the reseller and their technical support people don’t know it, or they’re not and Melbourne has their records screwed up. In either case, they both appear to be refusing to give me technical support for this, which lends credence to my argument that they’re just trying to delay in hopes that I’ll forget about it.They don’t know how stubborn I am (they should ask Netfirms).

I check the WHOIS information (again) and notice that Melbourne IT is indeed listed as the registrar, although I’m not sure if the reseller’s name normally appears on WHOIS along with the registrar. I replied to Melbourne IT, hoping to eventually get a human to look at this:

Yahoo customer service informed me that they are NOT A RESELLER, and that I must contact Melbourne IT directly for assistance with my domain. Melbourne IT is listed as the registrar on the WHOIS record for this domain. Please confirm that the domain transfer to GoDaddy.com is in progress.

Then, I fired off two emails to Yahoo, one telling them not to renew my domain (which they were planning to do later this week as part of my hosting package since it comes up for renewal next month), and the following which included Melbourne IT’s message to me:

Earlier this morning, Yahoo technical support told me (on a phone call) that Yahoo is NOT a reseller of domains, and that I have to contact the registrar, Melbourne IT, directly with my current problem with my domain kemsleydesign.com. However, Melbourne IT states quite clearly in the attached email that Yahoo is in fact the reseller for this domain and that you should be dealing with my technical support problems.

I am attempting a domain transfer away from Yahoo to GoDaddy, which was initiated more than 24 hours ago. My domain appears to be stuck in “Pending Current Registrar Approval” status, although I have entered the transfer Transaction ID, Security Code and Authorization Code from the GoDaddy site as required. Can you please confirm that this transfer is underway?

Meanwhile, over on GoDaddy, the hosting account finally accepted the switch from this blog domain to my corporate domain as the primary domain for the account, and I could initiate adding the blog domain as a secondary domain. This, however, takes a few hours so this blog address went from displaying my corporate website (bad) to displaying a GoDaddy parked domain page (worse). My own fault — I could have left this blog as the primary domain and added my corporate one as a secondary — but I thought that the switch would happen within minutes, not more than 24 hours. By now, I was unhappy with Yahoo, Melbourne IT and GoDaddy, and ready to go back to chiseling blog entries on stone tablets.

I searched around for other people with this problem, and found a few. In fact, I even found a document from GoDaddy specifically talking about transfers from Melbourne IT, so they must have seen this problem before. They state that it could take 5 days, since once GoDaddy requests the transfer at the registry, if Melbourne IT doesn’t respond to the registry’s request to approve/deny the transfer, new ICANN rules automatically approve it after five days. In other words, Melbourne IT probably just ignores requests for transfers and waits for them to time out; they’ve had their wrists slapped by ICANN for sloppy practices in the past when they abdicated responsibility during domain transfers to their resellers (although there is definitely dissent between Yahoo and Melbourne IT about whether Yahoo is actually a reseller). I realize that at this point, I’m about to become an ex-customer of Melbourne IT and they may not be fully motivated to serve my needs, but this is an incredibly poor bit of customer service.

This blog address finally sorted itself out around midday today. Stay tuned for more on the domain transfer.

Check out the new widget in my sidebar, just below the photos, called “What I’m Reading”. It’s generated from LibraryThing, where I can enter in books that I have in my library — using some very easy search tools that check Amazon and a number of other sources, so that I can just enter the title or author and see a list of hits — then create a widget for my sidebar that shows my recent books. By just adding in each book as I’m reading it, and setting the number of books to display to 1, it always shows what I’m reading right now. Okay, it shows one of what I’m reading right now, since I often read more than one at a time.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I really need some sort of social networking mashup around the Toronto Public Library site, where I could show the list of books on my hold list, and see those of my friends in order to get ideas of what to line up next. I have to check out more of the LibraryThing functionality, but this might serve a similar purpose.

After just moving my wine club’s hosting from Netfirms to 8i a couple of weeks ago, I find myself moving once again, to GoDaddy. I have this blog hosted at GoDaddy, plus a few other domains and small sites, and I know that it works for WordPress and my other needs.

Unfortunately, although the performance was much better at 8i than Netfirms, I appear to have been put on a new server (which is why the performance was good, I suppose), but one that didn’t quite have all the bugs worked out yet. I now believe that they don’t have any WordPress blogs hosted on 8i, since I had to request that they open the outbound HTTP port to akismet.com, the site that handles blog spam for WordPress blogs, after I started getting nailed with a ton of blog comment spam — something that would have been requested by other WordPress users if there were any. Then on Friday, I noticed that I was getting no email through 8i, and my email to that address were bouncing, so by Saturday I decided to just pull the plug. Too bad, because they were quite responsive from a customer service standpoint (in spite of having no phone support), but I just don’t have the time to work out their bugs for them. Luckily, I had the foresight to pay only for a month at 8i, and the refund from Netfirms was enough to pay for that month plus my domain transfer back to DomainsAtCost.ca plus a year of hosting at GoDaddy. I’m sorry to be having to go to an American company for hosting, but after trying two local ones that appeared to have good reputations, I had no choice.

It’s been a frustrating couple of months, but I admit that I’ve learned quite a bit in the process, which is always good. Also, having the wine club site hosted by GoDaddy gives me a chance to try out their email as well as their site hosting, and consider moving my corporate site over there since it would be about 1/4 the price that it currently is at Yahoo — not a big cost in any case, but I don’t like paying more than I have to for a commodity service as long as the quality is comparable. I like the GoDaddy webmail (although not as much as Yahoo), and so far the spam filtering seems to be working just fine.

My next step, if everything looks good for the next week or so, is to finally get the wine club site up on WordPress instead of static HTML. That would allow me to update it from anywhere that I had internet access, not just my own computer like I do now with FrontPage, and I can have a clean design consistent with the blog design. I’m quite sure that there will be some amount of drama around that, so stay tuned. If you want to check out the test site in WordPress now, it’s at www.aws.ca/test.

I finally moved my wine club’s site and blog off Netfirms (which sucks) and onto 8i Networks, where I’ve paid for only one month in order to figure out whether they are going to work for us. There were a few minor hiccups in the setup, such as me somehow not receiving the welcome email that told me how to login and set things up, but everything seems to be working now.

In their favour, the performance is hugely better. I can now consider setting up the entire site on WordPress, which allows me to update it from anywhere, since the MySQL performance has been fine so far.

Email is a bit problematic.

• I still don’t have their SMTP server working, and am using Sympatico’s SMTP for sending mail from Outlook, which is fine from home but won’t work if I’m travelling with my laptop.
• I’ve turned spam filtering on, but it doesn’t seem to be working. In fact, this is a global setting (turn on SpamAssassin) for all accounts, rather than allowing each user to set their own parameters. Considering the amount of spam that goes to the public email address for this site, that’s unacceptable.
• The webmail client provides a choice of SquirrelMail and Horde, neither of which I really like.
• The webmail uses port 2095, which could be blocked by some firewalls or proxy servers. I have complete control over my network, but there’s no promising that this is going to work in every internet cafe that I visit when I’m travelling.
• It doesn’t seem like it’s possible to forward a copy of all email to another account, either from the admin side or the user webmail side.

On the plus side in email, it is possible to configure an email box with any amount of space (presumably up to my disk limitations, which are pretty substantial). This is better than GoDaddy’s solution, which is a maximum of 25MB with a domain email account; why can’t these guys all provide a couple of GB like Yahoo does for their paid hosted accounts?

Anyway, I’ll be testing it out over the next 3 weeks or so, but I won’t take the WordPress version of the site live until I know that I’m staying on 8i.

Just testing out the Flickr plugin for Windows Live Writer, which allows me to search for any Flickr user’s photos and pop them right into a posting in Windows Live Writer (which I now use for all of my blogging). Suddenly, I’m not so concerned about the problem that I was having setting up a direct link to my blog from GoDaddy, even though it turns out to have been resolved since last time that I checked, since this is so much better! Thanks to Kate for pointing me to this.

One bug that I’ve found: the alignment feature doesn’t work: I selected to align this photo “right”, which it didn’t (I had to do it manually). When I looked at the HTML code that it generates, the reason is clear: inside the img tag, it is using the tag “alignment=right”, which is not a valid tag; it should be “align=right”.

Also, one feature that I’d like to see: although it does retain the Flickr username that I was last searching for, which will typically be my own, it doesn’t retain other setting defaults such as the picture size.

I’ll be trying this out more over the next weeks, since this makes it so much easier to blog with Flickr photos.

I’m also going to try out the acronym plugin for my business blog posts; I wrote a bit of Javascript to do this for when I was composing in the browser interface, but have been missing that since I moved to Live Writer.

I’ve never found the perfect ISP, and not for lack of trying. Moving all of my blogs (except for my business blog, which is hosted on an integration portal site) to WordPress a few months ago just highlighted a few of the problems with the ISPs that I do deal with, a point that I was reminded of this weekend when I upgraded — in one case unsuccessfully — to WordPress 2.0.5. Here’s my rundown.

Yahoo Small Business

This is the host for my corporate website, including my email hosting, and holds the archive of my business blog up to the date when it moved onto the integration portal site. I chose Yahoo primarily for the email capabilities: 2GB email boxes, the best webmail client that I have ever used, and excellent spam filtering.

Prior to my WordPress migration, I published my business blog onto my own site using Blogger and ftp publishing; however, Yahoo allows me to create a WordPress (or Movable Type) blog easily, without having to copy the files and set up the database myself. This sort of functionality is becoming more common with some of the hosting companies, and is great for those who don’t want to play around with MySQL and PHP files themselves. I moved my business blog archive over to WordPress, but noticed that in spite of the fact that I had “automatic upgrades” for WordPress enabled on Yahoo, my version was still 2.0.2. Since this is just an archive rather than an active blog, I never bothered to do a manual upgrade until today, when, emboldened by the success of the other upgrades, I attempted the upgrade to 2.0.5. Several attempts later, using by a clean install via Yahoo and a clean manual install, I gave up and went back to the 2.0.2 version.

My conclusion: Yahoo’s MySQL installation, besides being out of date, is somewhat screwed up; this, in turn, seems to be impacting the ability to do a WordPress upgrade or even a separate WordPress install. My advice: avoid Yahoo Small Business hosting if you need anything but the exact WordPress version that they’re offering, which is currently 2.0.2. This likely won’t be a problem until a major WP upgrade occurs and you really want some new feature in the new version.

If this were my primary blogging site, I would not be using Yahoo as my host any more, even if it meant giving up the webmail.

Netfirms

I recently started using Netfirms for my wine club’s website and blog, and I have to say that I’ve learned my lesson about taking hosting advice from a faux-technical, slightly ditzy blonde with a popular video blog. Yes, I listened to Amber Mac on her weekly CommandN video blog about their latest sponsor, Netfirms, and how great they are; unfortunately, it’s a load of crap.

The only benefit that I can think of is that they are a registrar for .ca (Canadian) domains, so are able to provide both domain registration and hosting in one package; that plus the plug from Amber made me take a look at them. Although I didn’t have upgrade problems with WordPress 2.0.5, they do have two very serious problems.

First of all, performance and availability, particularly of MySQL. There have been occasions where the site has been down completely, and others when the blog was down due to WordPress not being able to connect to the database. Although the interruptions only last for a matter of minutes, this is a low-volume e-commerce site where we sell tickets for our wine-tasting events and having outages is just not an expected or acceptable occurrence. File transfers and other operations on the site take forever; coupled with the outages, I’m guessing that they have some very under-powered servers that are having frequent overloads. The last time that this happened, I called while the MySQL database was actually down and I couldn’t connect to the database; the tech support just dithered around, claimed to not be able to reproduce the problem, and kept me on the line for long enough until the database came back up. He never provided an suitable answer as to what happened. As I’m writing this, I just browsed to the blog and it took at least 15 seconds to open the main page after resolving the address, which is completely unacceptable.

This is one reason that I haven’t moved the main web site to WordPress, although I redesigned the site so that I could do that: a MySQL outage would take the entire site down, since WordPress sites are all dynamically retrieved from the MySQL database on command.

The second major problem, and this will sound a bit obscure if you’re not into WordPress configuration, is that they don’t provide AllowOverride for .htaccess. There’s a long thread about it on the WordPress forums, specifically talking about Netfirms, and after much run-around, I had this confirmed by Netfirms support (via email), who first sent me to their general information on configuring .htaccess (which I’d read, and was way past), then told me that I was using directives in the file that they don’t support (which isn’t true), then finally admitted that they don’t provide AllowOverride after I asked them the question directly. What this means to non-WordPress geeks is that I can’t get “pretty” URLs for my blog posts; the URL has to include “index.php” in order to use a format other than the default (ugly) WordPress permalink structure. So my post URLs look like http://aws.ca/blog/index.php/2006/10/winemakers-blogging rather than http://aws.ca/blog/2006/10/winemakers-blogging. Not such a big deal on a blog, although I’m offended by the aesthetic, but a huge deal if I wanted to make the entire website run on WordPress: that would mean that all of the page URLs would have to include the “index.php”, so our About page, for example, would have to be http://aws.ca/index.php/about rather than http://aws.ca/about.

My conclusion: Netfirms sucks. Their servers are underpowered, and they’re not supporting some basic things required for the proper operation of a WordPress site, in spite of the fact that they provide the same sort of one-step WordPress installation as Yahoo. If I hadn’t prepaid for a year, they would no longer be the host for my wine club. Unfortunately, since we’re a non-profit group with a tight budget, I can’t justify just abandoning the investment, however small, and signing up another host.

GoDaddy

I use GoDaddy to host this blog, and have a few domain names parked here as well. In general, I like GoDaddy, although I find some of the administrative interfaces a bit clunky sometimes (and lacking in a file manager capability for moving files around on the site). I’ve recommended them to various people who have set up their own domains or business email, and there have never been any problems. I’ve had no outages on this site, and although I have to do the WordPress installation myself, the MySQL interface works fine.

Unlike the other two hosts, however, where I have a MySQL super user account and can create my own databases directly in phpMyAdmin, GoDaddy doles out my allotted 10 databases one at a time, creating a user with all permissions for that database and only launching you into phpMyAdmin under that user account. Since there’s no permission to create a new user, that means that that user is the only one for the database, so any security would have to be built into an application rather than using different MySQL logins with different permissions. I need to think more about the ramifications there before I start building any of my own applications, but applications like WordPress manage their own user tables internally rather than relying on MySQL IDs directly. And, to be fair, I mentioned previously that the Yahoo MySQL implementation is pretty screwed up: although I supposedly had super user login access, and could jump around between the different databases, there were a lot of things that I couldn’t do that I should have been able to, so I think that MySQL on Yahoo would be much more problematic than on GoDaddy.

The only problem that I’ve had with GoDaddy is when I tried to setup a direct blog posting link from Flickr. In order to do this, Flickr needs to access one of the core WordPress files (xmlrpc.php) on GoDaddy, but it always returns an error when trying to set it up. According to Flickr tech support, who were very helpful, the error message being returned is empty, so I went back to GoDaddy tech support, who were pretty useless in getting any sort of resolution. First, they told me that they don’t provide support for Flickr or WordPress. Duh. Then, when I just referred to it as an “external service trying to access a file” and asked them to provide error logs so that we could trace the actual problem, they tried browsing to the page themselves, saw the standard message about how the XML-RPC server only accepts POST requests (which is the correct behaviour) and told me that this was clearly an error with my WordPress installation. I told them that this was not an error message, and asked again for the error logs to try and trace the error, at which point they told me that they could not provide the error logs, that shared hosting accounts do not allow remote connectivity (huh? Is this their explanation for why the xmlrpc.php access failed? If so, it’s bogus), and tried to sell me dedicated hosting services. So on top of the actual problem, I now have a really bad taste about their technical support.

My conclusion: this is probably the best of the lot, although I’d be reluctant to start hosting any serious applications here based on the crappy technical support. Works perfectly for WordPress, however.

Late breaking update: After I posted this, I retried the Flickr setup, and it appears to work now. They must have had more complaints than just mine, and fixed the problem.

I know that there’s no perfect hosting solution, but going through three different ones has really highlighted some of the things to look for with any new hosting provider. Unfortunately, most of these things can’t really be determined until you’ve actually started using it, so I’ll likely only consider a monthly hosting plan for any new provider in the future until I figure out if all these things will work okay.

Just when I was about to delete him from my RSS reader, Rick Mercer came back from summer vacation and resumed blogging today. I look forward to his posts as well as the new season of his show.