jill shanna dot com

For those of you wondering why no new photos have been posted for a long time, videos have been basically non-existent, and I took a long hiatus on my website, here’s a big reason why. (This happened a couple months ago.) This rundown may help out some other newbies to some of this moving-from-one-host-to-another stuff:

I previously had hosting at Wingsix for this domain and Lunarpages for my other domain. But Lunarpages’ Basic Hosting plan allows for unlimited storage (which I need for my photos and videos) and unlimited add-on domains. So basically, I was paying for a domain at Wingsix when I could have had it hosted for free (and with limitless space) on Lunarpages. It was a matter of my finding the time to make sure I could really do what I wanted to do for free, back up my site, and move all of my data, WordPress, and Plogger databases and config files to Lunarpages.

I must interject that I left this domain registered through Wingsix, as moving it to Lunarpages’ registrar was going to incur a one-time fee of $20 or $30, or something, plus some annual fee–can’t recall how much. No thanks; I just pay $15 a year to Wingsix for it.

Now, my still-yet-to-be-made-public business site’s domain (I was about to put this online and ran into a strange issue with a free Flash photo gallery tool, got really busy with school and work, and put it on hold) and jillshanna.com are both on my Lunarpages account. I can manage them both from a single CPanel page, they can share databases, and jillshanna.com now exists as a subdomain of my other domain (but that’s transparent to the user). I have an optional second FTP home directory for jillshanna.com which is also a subfolder of my other site. It’s a cool deal–it was just a HUGE pain in the ass figuring out (mainly over e-mails with Lunarpages) what my options were and how it worked, and then getting it done.

Lunarpages Support was very nice and helpful; but my questions and hosting changes went through a lot of different techs, and occasionally, my questions or comments would be misunderstood or not fully answered. Still, I think they overall did their jobs. With secure 24/7 e-mail support, it probably took half the time it might have to do it by phone when their Pacific-Time offices were open (and as it was, figuring out what to do and taking the time to do it took two or three weeks). Downloading database backups as well as all my data, and uploading everything to the new spot took many, many hours. But in the end, with a few small changes to my DB config files, everything was finally working on the new host.

And fortunately, both WordPress and the FlowPlayer plugin for WordPress upgraded quickly and easily in one click. The best news is that the FlowPlayer plugin for WordPress, which is free and awesome, does work with what was the latest version of WordPress when I made these changes (version 2.9.1–we’ll see if WP works with 2.9.2). With some work and help from sidtheduck at the Plogger development team, I got all 3,000+ of my photos moved into an updated Plogger DB as well.

All of this means that I will soon finally be getting videos and new photos posted–there’s finally space, and there’s a way to put videos up in my posts. (I guess I’m a hypocrite, still not having done it–even though I composed most of ths post a few months ago….)

A tip: If you’re doing something similar and run Windows at home and you have tons of hosted files to upload or download and it will take you, say, 10+ hours to do it, disable the Windows Update service on your machine while you do it, or tell Windows Update not to download updates automatically, at least temporarily. It’s annoying when Windows Update downloads and installs updates that require a reboot and prompts you to tell it to remind you later over and over, but then you finally go to bed, and Windows Update sees that your system is “idle” (well, aside from all the files it’s trasferring over FTP…) and reboots it automatically during your file transfer in the middle of the night. I found this out the hard way and couldn’t find a way to stop the wheels of Windows Update’s planned reboot, once they were in motion. Fortunately, using FileZilla (which is free), I was able to quickly compare my source and destination directories the next day, after my interrupted upload, to ensure that all my files were uploaded to the server before Windows restarted the machine. That was an incredible time-saver.

Finally, as I mentioned before, I also decided to upgrade Plogger, which I use for tagging, organizing, and displaying my photos (and which is PHP-based). This seemed to work at first and then gave me “Could not move file: [file_path]” on a bunch of photos, asking me to check permissions on those files or directories, which I did to no avail. Also, the window would seem to time out after a while when it hadn’t uploaded everything I’d selected, when I tried uploading huge batches at once. Bringing the numbers down seemed to help at first but later resulted in the aforementioned issues. In the end, I just started trying to upload more at a time, because if it skipped the first 50, and you were uploading 50, it would just stop–so I’d upload 100 or 150 at a time, and it would upload those it could. Most of the errors ended up resolving themselves, until I got down to a bunch of problem files and got in touch with sidtheduck via a forum, and then by IM, to nip it in the bud by changing–I think–two lines of code in one of the config files. Hallelujah! I was finally, finally finished!

Hopefully, I won’t have to do something this time-intensive and cumbersome anytime soon to keep my sites running. I guess I get an A for effort.