Hey there. If you tried to visit yesterday, you probably got a database error. I still haven't figured out what is up with that. I think what was going on is that the database server was being moved, but it seems to be back now and the site still wasn't working. It's up now, mind you -- because you are reading it now -- but that is because I created a new database and uploaded the old content to it using my most recent backup (which, to the best of my knowledge, contains all of my recent posts, though a few comments may be missing). I e-mailed my host admin about the problem and was hoping to wait for a response, but my site not loading really, really bothered me so I had to try this. Hopefully they'll at least let me know what was wrong with the other server.

You'll also note (or not, since the change shouldn't really be noticeable on your end) that I upgraded to WordPress 2.1 shortly before the unexplained period of downtime. I don't think that has anything to do with the problem -- the site was working fine before I went to sleep late Saturday morning, the Scary-Crayon blog doesn't seem to be experiencing any analogous difficulties, and it's clear to me that they did something to the database server because earlier it was registering as having 0 MB in it despite clearly containing data -- but I suppose it's possible that the new WordPress install is somehow corrupting the database. Time will tell on that front, but in the meantime I'll be backing up my content much more frequently than normal (which admittedly wasn't all that frequent; maybe once every couple of months or so).

Also -- and again it's possible that it's something that got changed in WP, but I'm largely convinced that it's related to a server change because it began inexplicably on January 24 (before I upgraded WP on the 27th) -- I am no longer receiving notification when users post comments. I checked the mail logs and found this error: smtp server didn't accept RCPT To: command, replied "550 mail from 74.208.16.2 rejected: administrative prohibition". I'm not entirely sure what that means (aside from the obvious) or if I can do anything about it to fix the problem, but I'm doing some research and have posted on the WP support forums to see if I can't get around the difficulty. Natch, any info you have will be greatly appreciated.

Here's hoping Wesoteric doesn't die on us again! 😐