waynehastings.net now live

I gave up on my hosting company and started over.

www.waynehastings.net

ehostsource.com killed my site

I really dislike kicking a dog when he's down, but ehostsource.com has been a big disappointment during their server migration this month. I mean, I was due for a site redesign, but the situation is ridiculous. 

My site and e-mail reliability had been very poor for a couple of months before I finally heard that they were going to migrate to new servers. The migration started about three weeks ago. My site was down, and once the site was up again, my CMS (Joomla) wasn't working. The server move changed PHP paths and all kinds of stuff. So to keep things simple, I scrapped my site and started over with WordPress. 

The site is up now, barely. From minute to minute, you may get a variety of errors trying to browse my site.

Once the dust clears, I see a hosting migration of my own coming... 

For what it is worth, you can visit my newly redesigned, but decidely unstable, WordPress site here http://www.hastingsinteractive.com

Brush with Greatness: Dooce Book Signing

Last night I had my first "brush with greatness" since moving to Los Angeles. And this is a story for everyone who claims noone ever made money off of Twitter.

I discovered Heather B. Hamilton (aka Dooce) several months ago while I was still living in Memphis, TN. I spotted a reference to @dooce -- one of my Twitter friends had replied to her -- and the name caught my eye. Curious, I hit her website and discovered www.dooce.com and became a fan. I really enjoy her sense of humor and general outlook on life.

Earlier in the week, I saw her post that she was going to be at Book Soup in LA on April 2. So last night, we made the trek from our home in Alhambra to West Hollywood for the reading / signing.

It was a lot of fun. Heather was as funny and charming in person as I was expecting. She signed my copy of the book and I think I managed to get away without letting my star struck adolescent self make too big a fool of me.

Now think about this interaction for a moment. Heather is a writer. I found her first on Twitter. I became a fan of her work on her blog which I typically read via RSS in Google Reader. I travelled across town to a book signing at a book store I had not (yet) visited in person. And finally I purchased a book while I was there. 

I can't say that I would have ever discovered her if I hadn't been on Twitter at just the right moment. 

I think it is fair to say that being on Twitter was profitable for Heather. She is reaching an audience that might otherwise never find her. And since I have become a fan, I have been sharing her site with my friends (and the whole world) on my blog, on Twitter, and on Facebook, among other places.

Chalk one up for Twitter. If your business isn't on Twitter, you're leaving money on the table.

Not only that, but my site is down.

Not only have I spent the last two weeks leeching my neighbor's wifi -- read my previous post about getting DSL installed -- but my website hosting provider decided to move my personal website to a new server and broke the entire thing.

Ugh -- when it rains, it pours, as the saying goes.

But I was overdue for a redesign, so now is as good a time as any. And this time, I'm going to use WordPress, I think. (This after using pMachine for a few years followed by Joomla for a few years.)

You can get a new design preview here >>

Adventures in setting up a new AT&T DSL subscription

I moved to Los Angeles about two weeks ago, and it took nearly that long to get my AT&T order for DirectTV, DSL, and home phone service hooked up and running. 

To keep things simple, I went to the AT&T website and ordered the lowest cost, all-in-one package of DirectTV, DSL, and home phone service. 

The DirectTV tech arrived a couple days later and had the entire system with DVR in the living room and an antenna on the roof installed in just a hour or so. Quick and efficient.

Getting the home phone and DSL working had some snags.

First, they didn't include the apartment number when they shipped the DSL modem. So the modem arrived a few days later than it should have. I plugged up the modem and couldn't get a signal. So I had to brave the AT&T voicemail tree to get a tech visit scheduled.

A few days later, the DSL tech arrives. He checks the wiring in the house, then has to drive down the street to check the wiring on the pole somewhere. Turns out, the house isn't wired into the system properly. Once he gets that connected, he came back and verified everything was working. Not only that, he walks me through the entire AT&T/Yahoo/SBC account registration and setup. 

I wish I had gotten the tech's name. He was friendly, helpful, and informative. Employees like that are gold. He turned what had been a frustrating, drawn out process into a happy ending with warm fuzzy feelings. 

Part of the delay, I have to admit, is I didn't have a home phone I could plug into the wall jack. I cancelled home phone service years ago due to the high volume of telephone solicitations I was getting. So many, in fact, that it was a chore to delete the voicemails off the answering machine. And this was AFTER getting onto the Federal Do Not Call list and aggressively demanding my rights under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) to the companies calling me. So I killed my landline and had discarded my phone some time ago. If I had a phone on hand, I would have discovered the house wasn't getting dialtone.

So, two weeks of mooching on my neighbors' unsecured wifi and a handful of trips to Starbucks to use their wifi later, I'm legal again. I had gotten used to having my files on a local network, streaming videos and podcasts to my widescreen TV, and just generally living a digital lifestyle that doesn't work so well when you don't have your own spigot on the series of tubes that is the Internets.