I have most of the problems solved now. Not all the solutions are elegant, more workarounds, but they do work. It’s been a very long day, and tomorrow will be another one.

But I do have my discussion board working again, I’m pretty sure all my pages are working well (have to check in detail later), with the notable exception of my bookstore, which I will have to attack tomorrow. I might just change the program I use to make the bookstore if this one doesn’t prove to be an easy fix. Won’t be easy, but there are options out there.

Will I stay with Dreamhost? Probably. I got the Co-op working, which had been a major concern for me since I love the results, and I’m willing to take a look at whether or not the minor inconveniences that my workarounds give me (extra files to upload maybe, which means more difficult site maintenance), and maybe I’ll find a better way to handle them all. A good night’s sleep might just give me the inspiration I need to figure these things out.

I was quite the stress case this morning, though! There’s nothing like seeing the website you love have a major problem that means it’s pretty much useless to visitors and can’t earn any money either. Both were quite distressing to me. I have so many plans for this site, things I want to get done with it, that finding time for it all is quite a challenge, especially since my other sites also need attention. Just one of the delightful challenges of running a home business.

I hate changing webhosts!

I decided to switch to Dreamhost because I’ve heard good things about them. I’ve run into several problems so far and I don’t know if I’ll be staying with them. Not their fault too much, it’s just that their security settings don’t work well with certain things, such as the DigitalPoint Co-Op. The settings also make using PHP includes a bit trickier, and I’ve had to do a bit of a workaround. If I stay I’ll look for a cleaner solution. Having the Co-op work for me is something of a must - I get great results from it.

Setting up my discussion board isn’t easy either, but that’s a problem with pretty much any hosting. Getting the file sizes small enough that they will upload is not an easy task.

If things don’t work out, at least I’ll have one more question to ask before signing up with anyone else.

I guess the sitemap has finally kicked in. I checked my stats last night, and so far this month Googlebot has eaten more than 5 Gig of bandwidth. Considering that my site only takes about 83 Meg of storage space and I normally only use about 7-8 Gig a month, I’m a touch shocked. Delighted too, since I’m seeing a lot of pages getting indexed.

Now I have to decide what to do about it. I only have 10 Gig of bandwidth a month, so I can

1. Upgrade my hosting to get more bandwidth.
2. Take a chance that this will only happen this month and just buy more bandwidth.
3. Find a host with a plan that offers more bandwidth.

I can’t take too long thinking about it. I made some changes last night to hopefully ease the strain, since I saw that Googlebot was getting session IDs on my forum, so I tossed in some code to prevent that. Other than that, I don’t see much I can do to stop it since I have no intention of blocking the bot. I suppose I could limit it if I wanted to certain areas, but since I really want the whole site spidered that would be foolish.

It’s something of a late birthday/anniversary present. My husband didn’t get it on time because we had so much else going on at the time. But this is something I’ve really wanted.

My husband already has a Weber charcoal barbeque. It’s great for a lot of things, great flavor when you cook with it, but the new one is a propane barbeque. Why? Because when it’s really hot out it’s nice to be able to cook a good dinner without heating the house up. When I lived with my mother while going to college, during the summer I would cook our dinner outside several times a week. It was just so nice to keep the heat out of the house.

The one feature I insisted upon was the side burner. Why only cook part of the meal outside? With a side burner I can do pretty much everything outdoors.

Cooking outside is also just a nice chance to spend time with Ariel. She loves to play outside, and obviously I can’t leave her alone with a barbeque running. And if I cook outside, we’re more likely to eat outside, then play together some more.

OK, tried to post this yesterday and it didn’t work. Gage got his first tooth on Wednesday. I noticed it while watching Ariel’s swimming lessons. He was gnawing on my finger when I realized there was something sharp in there. Looks like tooth#2 shouldn’t be very far behind… there’s a distinct lump there.

Life has been so hectic lately I’ve barely been able to get any work done. Ariel’s swimming classes take a lot of time due to the drive, but they’re well worth it. Her teacher says she does worry a little about Ariel, because her boldness far outstrips her skill in the water. Ariel is not afraid at all. Of course, I’ve long had the same worries. I really wish there were a way to train her faster.