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Tuesday, July 30, 2002

Blue Domino and the Weblog Transfer Blues

I just had a similar experience with BlueDomino.com. BD is a new hosting outfit run by the guys at CoffeeCup Software. It's appealing becasue it is so affordable -- starting at $8.95 per month. Unfortunately, their tech support sucks like a Hoover and they have no interest in supporting Radio users.

I think the problem lies in BD's use of the ProFTPd ftp server. I was never able to get Radio to upstream files to the BD site. Lawrence Lee of Userland was quite helpful, and he was able to get a successful upstream to the site. I never could and neither could another new Radio user who was also testing BD, but using a completely different computer and network.

Despite several attempts by Lawrence Lee of UserLand to gather ftp session data and help me debug the process we were ultimately unsuccessful. Thankfully, I was only trying to upstream a category -- and it was just a test category, at that. No harm done.

But Blue Domino is not a place that Radio users should consider. They made no effort to help or provide any useful information. I'm not even sure they looked into the problem, although I did get a blow-off answer from one off their tech support reps.

What does this have to do with Steve? Well, I was considering trying ProHosting next. I know several people who use ProHosting successfully, and CRM Association (an industry group I work with) has used ProHosting for two years without a hitch. But I am leery now of trying them with Radio.

I guess the point is that, for a reason I can't fathom, Radio may exhibit some issues with certain ftp servers or host systems and we need to be careful where we plan to move Radio-based weblogs. I successfully upstream ftp to Interland and Mindspring, but failed at BlueDomino.

If you're going to move your weblog be sure you start out slow and test the waters with a simple Category upstream first. Check with others to see if they have used that hosting company successfully. If not, see if you can get the host company to give you a test directory for testing before you move your domain. But try to validate your ability to upstream successfully before you commit.

XCOPY and myFixFilePaths Don't Synch For Me

In a recent post on Radio Supports XCOPY Deployment and Synching I used a piece from Jon Udell's weblog on how to use XCOPY to synchronize Radio on multiple computers. I thought this was pretty useful but thought it would likely need Andy Fragen's myFixFilePathsAndAddresses script.

Tonight I tried both. I've been using XCOPY (actually XXCOPY) to backup my Radio folder to another drive, but I haven't tried to run Radio from there. Tonight I XXCOPY'd the Radio folder over to my laptop, then started it up and ran the file paths script.

The XCOPY and the script both ran as expected, but Radio didn't work corectly afterwards -- I had some errors when I tried to change a couple of Prefs settings.

I didn't spend much time on it yet. I may spend more another day. Tomorrow I have 15 hours of road time ahead of me and I don't feel up to the challenge.

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This Page was last updated: 2/9/2003; 11:17:23 AM