Category: Blogging

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Apologies…

Apologies if the site is acting a bit…wonky. I don't know if it's just me (I'm currently using the latest beta of MacOS Sequoia) or it's something on the back end at my host, but I'm noticing some strangeness with stuff loading. Sometimes the header will load in Safari, but not in Firefox. Other times various individual images will load in Firefox but not Safari. And don't even get me started with the Duck-Duck-Go browser! I've re-enabled some backend tools to help with load times, but I'm not sure it hasn't done more harm than good…

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WordPress Woes

As undoubtedly most of you have noticed, Voenix Rising has been having a few…issues…over the past couple weeks. Based on the last time this happened, I knew I'd have to get my ISP involved to provide me the necessary information I needed to resolve the issue. (That information was not something I could get myself, so…)

Anyhow, without giving too much away, I applied the fix and all seemed well…until I noticed my scheduled posts were no longer working. Ultimately the solution to that should've been obvious, but thanks to a few WordPress plugins and going down some rabbit holes that led nowwhere, I was able to track the issue down to the changes I'd made to single file on the site after conferring with my ISP.

I'm not saying that this has fixed everything, but at least queued posts are working normally again and the various other errors I was seeing internally have been resolved. Time will tell if the bigger problem that started this whole exercise has gone away or not, but I'm holding out hope.

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Crisis Averted

I woke up this morning to this email from my web host:

I thought, "Oh FUCK. I just renewed my hosting a few weeks ago (a month ahead of time), so when does this shit actually go down? I knew my site was huge (I was for some reason remembering 1TB or so.), but did that mean after the hammer falls they would just randomly delete stuff to make it fit within the new size limits?

So I clicked on the link and saw the potential $950 charge for the Pro hosting. Not only no, but HELL no!

Naturally this sent my head spinning the rest of the day. Could I delete a lot of the older stuff? I remembered when I outright deleted everything without a backup and started fresh in 2012—and regretted it for years afterward.

I know I have a lot of inane garbage on this blog, but I'm still attached to it, however silly it is. (And truth be told, even I cringe at a lot of the older stuff I've written, as I'm sure I'll do with my current word salad years from now.)

So the next question was could I find a new adult-content friendly host with unlimited storage and move everything?

The thought of moving hosts is about as enticing as a root canal, but I started googling "unlimited storage and adult content friendly." I came up with a few names. Surprisingly, my current host was not among them….so I may end up having to move Voenix Rising at some point anyway if they ever figure out there are—gasp!—penises on this blog. (Frankly I'm surprised it hasn't happened by now, considering the number of times I've had their techs poking around, trying to figure out why the site errors out so much of late.)

So while getting how-to pages on how to transfer domain names and whatnot, I stumbled across my host's main page and saw the "Pro" hosting advertised for significantly less than what the email link showed me.

I paused for a moment to actually verify the size of all this drivel, and it turns out it was nowhere near 1TB. It was, in fact, only about 45GB. Still over the 40GB limit of my current hosting plan, but certainly not the monster I thought it was.

And that $900 pro plan? That was for three years, and I only renew yearly.

Once I saw that, I realized going Pro (which actually wasn't unlimited, but rather topped out at 100GB…at least for new subscribers) was doable after all—especially since I'd be credited with the year of hosting I just paid in advance for.

Crisis averted. Voenix Rising will continue in its present form and at its present home until such time the issue of penii comes up.

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Every Day It's Something

I don't know what's going on with my hosting provider, but it seems every damn day something isn't working. Today I can't upload photos. I can't FTP into the site. I can't tell you how often I've gotten the dreaded Server Error message when attempting to access the site.

And don't even get me started on their tech support…

For that reason, I'll probably be moving hosts this weekend, so there may be a period this weekend when Voenix Rising is legitimately offline.

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Back Up…For Now

Twelve hours later, we're back up again. I was pouring over error logs from the hosting site and saw a suspicious "account suspended" script had run two days ago. That wouldn't be the source of the outage, but it got me feeling a bit nervous. I'm paid up with not only hosting but also my domain name through the end of this year, but I stated looking for other adult-content-friendly hosts. Moving everything would be a major pain in the ass, but at least I know it can be done relatively painlessly if needed…

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Apologies If Any Of You Are Experiencing Difficulties

My hosting company is apparently having…issues. Images aren't loading or are timing out. Sometimes the site is completely inaccessible.

This normally resolves on itself after a brief period, but it seems it's hanging on  today like Trump's fantasies of avoiding prison.

I think this is a sign I need to get off my ass and run the errands I need to do today.

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I'm Getting Tired of Doing This

I'm going to take a break from this here blog thingie for a while. I don't know if it's going to be a few days or a few weeks or until I get so bored I have to start posting again, but right now I'm just burnt out.

I originally started blogging in 2005 as a way of expressing my frustration at what was happening in the country with the Bush administration. Who could've possibly foreseen the hellscape that was going to manifest slightly more than a decade later, the effects of which we're still wading through.

Obviously I've still used this medium to express my frustration with the direction the country is going, but it seems that every. damn. day. there is some outrage perpetrated by the right that's more horrific than the day before…and I just can't. There aren't enough memes in the world to express what I'm feeling right now.

I still firmly believe that Democracy is going to win in this battle, but it's not going to come through without a few broken bones and a black eye.

And that's all I'm going to say for now.

Of course, watch me turn around and repost something cool I found online tomorrow…

Stay tuned.

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A Programming Note

To my Subscribers:

I'm busy re-posting items from the version of Voenix Rising that I deleted prior to moving to Denver via The Wayback Machine, so if you get email notifications of new posts, they aren't actually new…they're just…rediscovered.

Because I've got nothing better to do. Like cataloging my vinyl collection.

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The Vagueries of Browsers

I have—or should I say I had—four browsers loaded on my laptop. Why, you ask? Because NONE OF THEM work consistently with all websites I visit.

Being a Mac user, for the longest time I was using Safari exclusively. I like how it automatically offers to pop in those two-factor authentication numbers that come in via text when you're logging into certain websites—because, of course, it's integrated with Apple Messages.

For a while I was using the new Microsoft Edge. It's built on Chrome, but it doesn't seem to be the annoying memory hog (or data harvester) that Chrome has proven itself to be. It also allows me to use certain Chrome extensions (like ad blockers) that Safari does not.

Many years ago I used to be a Firefox apostle, but I found it refused to play nice with—or in some cases even open—certain websites. I finally abandoned it for that reason. Too much of a hassle. (Come to think of it, I had the same issue with Safari years ago and that's what led me to Chrome.)

I was discussing these browser issues with a friend of mine a few weeks ago and he said he was firmly in the Firefox camp and found it incredulous that I wasn't—if only because of the built-in security in the browser. He said most of the issues I'd been complaining about from years past had been long since resolved and that I should give it another try.

I took him up on his suggestion, and have been happy with the decision. While it doesn't meet all of my needs consistently, it does it enough that I removed Edge and Chrome.

What led me to this post, however, is a quirk I noticed when posting video clips. In Safari, Chrome, and Edge, when I post videos, they just appear as black boxes with the play button in the center. There's no preview, or "poster image" displayed, necessitating the need for me to add one manually in WordPress.

Firefox, however, displays the videos with the preview already in place, not only when I'm composing the posts, but also when they're published—something none of the other browsers did.

Granted, I still have to manually add a poster image for the maximum compatibility for my readers, but it's still cool to know that it's not needed if you're using Firefox exclusively.

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Welcome to the Grievance Journal

I bought this for one purpose: to liven things up around here at Voenix Rising. I'm going to start posing questions that were provided as food-for-thought in this book. Participation is not required, but it might be fun for y'all to vent anonymously…

Want your own copy? Get one here.

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"GeT oFF mY LaWN!"

A long-simmering rant:

Okay, as a long-time "content creator" blogger I have to say it:

I hate, hate, hate all the new graphic file formats. I don't care if it's GIFV, WEBP or HEIC. They all need to die in a fire. Right now compatibility is non-existent, and merely reposting something I find online often involves downloading it—and if I can't convert it to something usable like JPG or GIF in-house—uploading it to a website to convert and then downloading the image file a second time. It's a pain in the fucking ass.