Metapost: Technical Difficulties Coming!

Folks, I going to attempt to transfer my domain name ("anamardoll.com") from the current registrar (Weebly) to something a little more customer-focused (probably GoDaddy unless ya'll have better suggestions) and this will probably occur sometime in the next few days. I do apologize for any disruption in service, but some of our Canadian readers are having trouble accessing the site in Canada and it *appears* to be a domain name issue, but I've had zero luck in dealing with my Weebly contacts.

If anyone has done this already and has advice, speak up!

Otherwise, if you have any trouble accessing the site this weekend, that's why. What can you do to minimize the pain? If all goes badly, I may need to back off to the blogger address for a day or two -- that would be anamardoll.blogspot.com so have that bookmarked and ready. Also, make sure you have a way to contact me -- once everything is working fine, I'll be tweeting and facebooking that *I* can see the site and then it'll be up to ya'll to chime in if you can't.

And, again, this will be over the weekend -- probably Thursday or Friday when I start working it. Stay tuned, and I do apologize in advance. Hopefully this will be so smooth, you won't even notice the transition.

16 comments:

j y said...

i have my domain hosted with netfirms. priorty to seeing your youtube video about rooted nook color. I didn't even know that blogger can have a custom domain. anyways... that has given the push i needed to restart my amatuer blog. I too hoped to earn 10 bucks but not a month... lol so i can quit my job. and live overseas and have a simple life with my small family.

J.D. Montague said...

I'd recommend Namecheap.com--I have an absurd number of domains hosted with them (for several years) with nary a problem and they don't spam you. Plus, their user interface is quite easy to navigate and use (much easier than some of the other registrars I've had to deal with).

As far as GoDaddy, I've heard a number of horror stories generally stemming from GD randomly locking down a domain name it suspects for doing something naughty and, in the event that you accidentally allow your domain name to lapse, their fee to get it back is insane. This last bit I cannot confirm from experience, though.

Also, as long as you add the proper DNS information when you're registering the domain, you shouldn't see any downtime at all. ;)

If you need help with any of it, just shoot me an email.

mmy said...

J. D. -- I think I was the first person to let Ana know that at least some ISPs were having issues with her domain. Weird thing -- I have two internet service providers and using one of the Ana's blog came up fine and using the other one simply got directed to the google cache of the page in question. Since I also have a subscription with an independent DNS I adjusted by connection with the problematic ISP and BINGO Ana appeared.

So part of the net wasn't getting Ana and part was. If you have any ideas/suggestions as to what might have been the problem it would be helpful to me at least since I am kerflummoxed.

J.D. Montague said...

mmy, not sure what happened, but it sounds like a DNS caching problem on your ISP's end. If you don't mind divulging, who was the ISP in question? (You may actually want to check if they're known for DNS resolution/caching issues.)

mmy said...

Hi J.D. -- I initially thought it was the ISP (and yup, I informed them* -- in fact they were incredibly helpful to me) but then found that there were sites that didn't come through on either of my ISPs. I sent copies of screencaps of everything to Ana so she could actually show people what things looked like from our end.

*And managed to confuse them because when the techs connected to the internet one way they couldn't see Ana's site and when they connected another way they could. Anyway, the problem was logged. This is the second time in three weeks that I have heard about a site going dead for one set of people and not another. Since I do the blogaround link-checking for The Slacktiverse I get forwarded issues like that.

J.D. Montague said...

Hehe...Ana just emailed me as well and I figure out the problem is most likely linked to her domain name's A-records (i.e. the Address records are still using the Weebly IP blocks as opposed to Google's which can be problematic with some ISPs...through no fault of their own).

Just to be clear though, are you able to access the site using the www prefix? And the problem resolving occurs when omitting the prefix?

Ana Mardoll said...

Here's a picture (well, a link to the problem description WITH a link to a picture) of the A-records as they are currently set up. It's Greek to me, I'll confess. o.O

http://www.google.fi/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=5b9e083ddbfee423&hl=en

mmy said...

Just to be clear though, are you able to access the site using the www prefix? And the problem resolving occurs when omitting the prefix?

Nope, couldn't access the site using either the www prefix or not. Then shifted to a different DNS and it comes in perfectly.

But if you ping the address and then use the resulting ip number in the browser you get some really interesting "messages."

J.D. Montague said...

OK, thank you. I'm almost certain it's an address issue and I'm hoping that updating the corresponding IPs to match Google's specified IP block will do the trick. The only downside is, depending on the ISP, any changes made may take anywhere from a few seconds to 72 hours to propagate.

Ana Mardoll said...

J.D. has emailed me a possible fix (THANK YOU J.D.!!!) and I've set it up in the registrar. I don't know when it will take effect, though, or how we can fix it. I need a guinea pig.......... *shifty eyes*

mmy said...

Let me know when you want me to check it out and I'll give it a try.......working together we will get it done :)

Pthalo said...

I'd been having problems over the past few days, but I haven't run into the problem since this entry was posted -- I was getting the message that her site wasn't published intermittently. My ISP is one of the major ones in Hungary, but I use OpenDNS. If I do get the problem again, though, I'll e-mail you guys.

Ana Mardoll said...

I'm hoping that it's working now, but I'm thrilled to have another beta tester. Thank you!

mmy said...

Ana, for the moment I would suggest that anyone who has problems uses OpenDNS or a similar service. I checked their cache (you can do so online) and they seem to have you properly resolved on all of their servers. I will check the problematic DNS again later in the day.

Timothy (TRiG) said...

Since GoDaddy was mentioned earlier,

I quite like companies which vociferously allow all sorts of free speech. And I'm perfectly happy with companies which prefer not to have their brand name associated with hate, pornography, or whatever. I'm less happy with companies which claim to be in one camp and are actually in the other. GoDaddy has a fairly strong policy against hate speech, and yet continues to provide services for ProjectSEE, an organisation which actively calls for the murder of LGBT people in Kenya.

TRiG.

Ana Mardoll said...

Thank you for telling me that!

I really feel so similar to you, and I was trying to verbalize that earlier in the week with regards to Facebook. I would actually prefer sites not censor content, but if you're going to do it, do it consistently! :(

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