There’s some great wisdom out there. On the Twitter accounts I follow, I’ve enjoyed reading some great thoughts from several people. In less than 140 characters, they provide some interesting thoughts and ideas on improving your life or your business. But once they have been tweeted, these thoughts are often lost in the Interwebs, probably never to be found again. Yes, they can be re-tweeted, but these thoughts are like ripples on a pond. They spread out to others, but the longer the time from the initial splash, the weaker and less-noticed they get.

So I thought there should be a place to gather all of these thoughts into one place. And, since I needed a quick project as a break from the other sites that I have been rebuildng, I decided a new web site might be interesting to create.

And the result is “The Pragmatica” at www.thePragmatica.com. What’s a “Pragmatica” ? It is “a place where you can deal with the problems that exist in a specific situation in a reasonable and logical way instead of depending on ideas and theories.” It’s practical advice, not high-faluting ideas.

And it’s a simple site: a form to enter a Pragmatica, and then a display of a bunch of Pragmaticas. And a way to ‘vote’ up-or-down on each Pragmatica. A simple place for thoughtful and even goofy ideas that make you think. (Although that statement could be redundant and repetitive.)

Each Pragmatica is reviewed by our crack staff of reviewers (that’s me) before being visible, so that I can make sure that the Pragmatica is appropriate for the site.  I find the thoughts there quite interesting.

Today is our son’s Jason’s birthday. He would have been 29.

Gone too soon. We all miss him.

I have finished the “We Remember Them” site for the POS-FFOS (Parents of Suicide – Friends and Family of Suicide) group. (They are a great support group for those that are affected by suicide.) This is another site that had to be totally rebuilt due to the One-Man-Hosting-Company that refused to provide any customer service, had availability problems, and would not give the group access to their web site files and databases. So I have had to rebuild every site on a new host (Bluehost, which is excellent, BTW).

The new We Remember Them (www.we-remember-them.com)  “was created to provide a place for people all over the world to place the names of deceased loved ones so that their names will not be forgotten. I think it is quite nice-looking, and easy to view the names that were submitted. There is an “Outreach” page that contains links to other support sites (many of which I have re-built). The sites are highly recommended for those that need support and comfort.

Now it’s on to the next project for the group. There will be some programming challenges, but I think the result will be worth it.

In other news, we had a bit of snow last night, ending up with about 2 inches on the ground. So I got a bit of exercise this morning clearing off the 50-foot-wide driveway with my snow shovel. It wasn’t too bad; consider what my old friend John Dominik (he lives in Minnesota) has had to deal with:

“It took me about two hours to get the mail box shoveled out. You don’t want to know Driveway time.”

I’ve now gone to full-time status at the new job. Keeping busy there; the latest project is a series of vbScripts that will combine their web site log files into one location for visitor reporting. That’s been sort of fun; I enjoy doing programming (although I am certainly not an expert). It’s nice to have those “Aha!” moments when something works correctly.

Finally got the last finishing touches on the latest project. I alluded to the project in the post “Do You Have Control of Your Web Site?”. This new site was one of those sites that was ‘orphaned’ (to use a kinder word than ‘abandoned by the hosting provider’). There was a limited backup of parts of the database, but I had to do lots of manhandling of the database to get it into the proper format.

The site is a memorial to suicide victims, called “Suicide Memorial Wall“. It’s a place where the families and friends of suicide victims can post names on a memorial wall. As you three long-time readers know, our son Jason took his life after suffering from manic-depression for about 10 years. Since that time, we (mostly Pam) have been involved in various on-line support groups.

This site, along with several others, which you will find on the “Outreach” page of the Suicide Memorial Wall, was originally hosted on the OneManHostingCompany (OMHC) servers, which have had some issues with reliability and availability. So the owner of the site decided it was time to move the sites (content and databases) to a new hosting company (we chose BlueHost, since I’ve had good luck with them for several other sites I help manage).

The problem was that I couldn’t get FTP access (or access to the databases) from the OMHC folks, despite numerous email requests (that were mostly routinely ignored). That required a convuluted process of ‘scraping’ the sites (when they were available) to get some of the source code. But the databases were unavailable.

So I have spent at least 150 hours rebuilding several of the sites that used to be on OMHC. And I finally got the Suicide Memorial Wall done, along with the support forum site for the families and friends of suicide (Suicide Grief at http://www.suicidegrief.com/), and the Parents of Suicide-Friends and Family of Suicide at http://www.pos-ffos.com/ )  These two sites, among others, are a significant source of support of people who have been touched by suicide.

If you are so affected, or know of others that are affected by suicide, I urge you to visit those sites. They will be an immense help. I am pleased that I could help the groups and members by rebuilding the sites. But it would have been a lot easier with better support from the OMHC.

For those that wish to pay attention, here’s the month’s wrap-up.

Enjoying the new job at a local government agency (which is the same type of place I used to work at in California). I work as one of the Web Applications Specialists, so I take care of web applications (like their Content Management System) and other servers. Similar to what I used to do, so there’s a good fit. It’s a part-time gig at the moment, which is nice. And it’s full benefits, which is saving a lot of money on my medical costs. Since I retired out of state, I used COBRA as the medical benefit, and that can get quite expensive (more than $1K/month). My medical benefits cost at the new job is under $500/month.

And the job will go full-time in 2-3 weeks, since the other part-time person (the other “half” of my position) is leaving in two weeks. That was expected, and was part of the job deal. So, full-time for me, which is nice. It keeps me busy (and out of the house, which is an advantage my wife Pam is enjoying). The commute is not bad: a bit farther than in CA, but less congested. Commuting in a snowstorm will be a new adventure, though.

I’ve been keeping busy rebuilding a web site (see the previous post). It’s a database-driven site, so lots of PHP programming with a bit of Javascript thrown in. It’s been a big project the last 6-8 weeks (less the two-week ‘appendix vacation’), but it’s now only a few days from going ‘live’. I enjoy the web site programming, which I do in my comfortable recliner, often while watching TV.

The weather here in Utah has been cold lately, with a few snowstorms thrown in the mix. I am still enjoying the snowfall; the Wasatch mountains always look nice with a white covering. Although parts of the area, especially closer to the mountains, get a lot more snow than we do, the last storm just deposited a couple of inches in my front yard. And the neighbor snuck over with his snowblower and took care of the driveway, so that was nice.

Family is fine; Stacy (youngest) is expecting in April, and the other grandkids are as cute as usual.

And I am getting addicted to “Angry Birds” on the Droid.

I’ve been spending a lot of time recreating about 10 web sites. The reason? The web site owner, who does not have technical skills, can’t get control of her sites.

Here’s the situation. The web sites, which provide a needed social and emotional support system, is hosted by what appears to be a one-man web hosting company (we’ll call it OneManHosting Company – OMHC). The web site owner creates some of the content using FrontPage, then transfers it to the OMHC servers. Some of the sites are just basic web pages, and other sites have databases. OMHC has coded some of the pages (using PHP as the language) to display the data.

OMHC has been having some infrastructure problems the past two month, resulting in the sites not being consistantly available to the public.  The issues appear to be related to DNS issues combined with server issues, although even that is not clear. The end result, though, is that trying to load the web site results in a “site not found”.

The web site owner has communicated repeatedly via email to OMHC, with limited response. Customer service doesn’t appear to be a strong point with OMHC. Since the web sites provide much-needed social and emotional support for it’s users, the unavailability of the sites is significant to the visitors.

I was asked to help with the technical issues of the web site unavailability problems. I’ve communicated with OMHC, again with limited (and sometimes no) responses to my emails. Since the availability of the sites is important, we (the web site owner and I) decided that it was best to move the hosting to a new hosting company (we chose BlueHost, as I have had great success with them for other clients).

Now it is not terribly hard to move a web site to a new hosting company. You copy all of the pages via FTP, and you export the databases to a SQL file on your local computer. Then you transfer the pages to the new host location, and use the phpMyAdmin program to create and import the databases from your backup copy. Once all the pages and databases are moved, you change the nameservers to the new host’s values. (Nameservers are what point the web site address to the hosts’ systems and the host’s server that contains your content). The process is fairly easy technically, although it takes a bit of time to transfer the files. Figure about a half-day’s worth of work to move an average non-commercial web site.

The Problem

But, here’s the problem. OMHC doesn’t have a FTP (File Transfer Protocol) connection to the web site files. And they don’t have a “Control Panel” type of interface that allows access to the databases. Both items are normally available at hosting sites. Except at OMHC.

So, a bit more effort is needed. An email to OMHC asking for FTP access (not very hard for a competent hosting company to install). Once FTP is available, I can install a simple program that gives me access to the databases (assuming I have the database user name and password). Alternately, the email asked OMHC to send me the page files and a database export via email (or even burn the files to a CD/DVD). Not technically difficult to do.

Except that OMHC, showing their ‘great’ customer service skills, basically ignores multiple requests to provide the page files and databases. In fact, since OMHC has done the programming for the access to and display of the data, they are claiming that they ‘own’ the database (and the PHP files, since OMHC coded the PHP pages).

This is an interesting claim, IMHO. I’m not a lawyer, but it appears to be reasonable to assume that if visitors are inputting data (such as via a message forum, or form entry) in response to the service provided by the web site owner, then the web site owner should own (and have control of) the databases.

To further muddy the waters a bit, there was no actual agreement (contract) for the programming work for the databases. The web site owner has been paying a yearly fee for the web site hosting services, plus additional fees for the programming. But, again, it would seem to me that the web site owner, even absent a written agreement/contract, still owns the web site content, including databases.

So, we have web sites that aren’t available to use, databases and web site files we can’t get copies of, and a valuable support for clients that is unavailable.

That’s been what I have been doing for the last several weeks. I’ve got a program that will copy web site’s pages to my computer. It’s good for HTML pages, but not PHP pages. But it’s a start; it saves a bit of time in rebuilding a site from scratch.

One of the web sites was a message forum, so I installed phpBB (a great message board open-source program) on the new host, set up the forums, tweaked some settings, and got it on-line fairly fast. Some other sites were just HTML pages, so the web site copying program helped with that.

The database-based site was a bit harder. The database has about 9000 records, and there was a copy of the data in text form. I spent quite a few hours massaging that data, getting it into a new database. But there are data input forms to create, processing routines to create, pages to re-create (lots of page code cleanup). I’ve probably got 40 hours into this project.

And Your Point?

The point  of this diatribe is … if you have a web site, does your web site belong to you? If you have had someone ‘build’ some pages or databases for you, is there a clear ownership of those pages and data? Do you have a current backup copy of your database or web site? Are you confident in the technical skills and availability of your web site host? Is the technical support for your web site acceptable? Do you have a process (and the technical expertise) to recreate your web site in case of hosting problems?

Who has control of your web site?

It all started the middle of last month. It seemed like a bit of stomach flu, you know, the kind whether you are not sure if you need to sit or kneel in the small one-seat library (the room with the fan). So I stayed home from work (a new job; had just been there a week), doing the liquids and chicken soup. To no avail.

Went to the doctor two days later (Thursday), he though stomach flu also, so advised rest and bland foods. Sunday rolls around, still sick. Just enough energy to use the TV remote. Not enough energy to use the computer (that is quite unusual).

So went to the ER on Sunday afternoon. Had an x-ray that possibly showed some internal blockage. Got a CAT-scan that showed the same thing. So was admitted to a nice room (single) in the hospital. Was feeling slightly better on an ice water (plus IV) diet. Got some real food for breakfast and lunch on Tuesday. Tuesday afternoon, that food left the building the way it came in.

Doctors decided that there might be some intestinal blockage. Scheduled for some laparoscopic poking around on Thursday. Wednesday my atrial fibrillation kicked with the irregular heartbeat. This happens occasionally, but usually resolves within 2-3 hours. It still hadn’t resolved by Thursday AM, and the anesthesiologist wasn’t happy about an operation with an irregular heartbeat, so spent Thursday with various drugs trying to get the heartbeat back to normal.. That happened late Thursday night, so Friday AM the doctors approved the surgery.

That happened Thursday afternoon. The doctore poked a few holes in my abdomen, stuck the camera inside, and looked around the intestines for a blockage. Didn’t find one, so he decided to head for my appendix. And found that infected and impacted, so removed it.

One day of recovery, and home on Saturday, 12 days after this all started. Two weeks later, the ‘plumbing’ is still not quite normal (which is normal, I guess). But I have gone back to work, and am generally a bit better.

The advantage is that this ‘diet’ has resulted in a loss of about 18 pounds (that’s a good thing). I’m just not thrilled about the technique involved.

Still not quite at full energy. And the diet is not quite normal yet (no MOINK Balls for me). “Output” is not quite normal yet, although improving.

And I am back on the computer again. There was minimal computer use during that two weeks (the first week at home). And I have had excellent care at the hospital, and much spoiling at home by my good wife. And some interesting computer work since returning home (as you will see in the next post).

So, my appendix has gone the way of my gall bladder. Out through a small 1/2″ incision.

Things are  a bit better than before.