Overly attentive readers may have noticed that for a number of hours yesterday the website was down, or at least running on a severely limited interface, a bit like the view from Pendle on a misty day – not a great deal to see! This was owing to yet another hack. Essentially what appeared to have happened was that I had seemingly installed one or two many Word Press plugins over the months and subsequently had forgotten what worked and didn’t affect the site in a negative way – versus what did not work and affected the site in an adverse way. In this case it was all down to mis/re direction. In a nutshell if you get the domain part of my website correctly entered in your browser’s address bar then it should load up the desired page, if not then you should get redirected to a page which will tell you that the page for which you were looking does not exist.

Yesterday (and probably for a good number of days prior to my noticing this) this was just not happening, a user could enter (for example) http://fatgoatwalks.co.uk/bigblackdog and be redirected to a website that had been so maliciously designed as to warrant a Google “Reported Attack Page” alert and failure of the browser to load the said page. Obviously this was not something with which I wanted to be associated, so after an exchange (or several) with my web host’s technical support team it was decided (note the passive voice there!) to wipe the blog database and files from their web server. Fortunately I do (often) practice what I preach and had a number of daily backups from which I could restore the posts etc once the wipe and re-installation was complete. As you observe this has now been done.

I have lost a great deal of the connectivity that was afforded to me via the plugins, it may yet prove to be that a lot of these where superfluous. The best plugin that I had was “GeotagPhoto” which has simply stopped working and no matter how many times I try to re-install it still fails to ‘do’ what it once ‘did’. This is indeed a shame. I will be adding the Facebook, Twitter, Photo Bucket and FlickR plugins once more but I will have researched more deeply than before; the histories, progresses and origins of each plugin that is to be installed from here on in.

Now I have not always been known for my love of Mozilla’s flagship product, their browser FireFox and I had a pretty tumultuous first couple of years together – in short I thought that version one was great and then they ruined it.

It wasn’t until version 3.6 that the rift between us healed and I finally got around to setting it to be my default browser at work – at home it’s still IE 8 and about that we are having no further discussion!

Version 4 appeared to have brought a whole new resilience and stability to it…until I began to suffer many, many, many crashes with Firefox alone. I have other browsers – I have to state this before the Mozilla police jump upon me. Google maps and Google Earth embedded version both seemed to completely suck the life out of Firefox 4. Okay you can argue that this is not the fault of the browser if these are third party add-ons. True. However, if Google Chrome and Internet Explorer both don’t fall foul of the same add-ons then wait a minute Firefoxophiles: “Well this is a bit embarrassing”!

The Firefox police, (they lurk around just waiting for anyone whatsoever to say bad things about their holy grail) will demand of you “Did you submit a bug report?” Are you using anything else? Might it not be a failing of your equipment? Say aren’t you a sympathizer of George Fox and the Quaker movement??? (Okay they might not say the last item – I’m going for effect here!) To be honest – I don’t want to submit a bug report – only people that are into submitting bug reports submit bug reports – I’d rather just scream and shout and be all irrational!

So for now I have uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox 4 and wait with baited breath for it to start to fail again. If I need to use any of the Google extensions then I’ll run them in Google Chrome where I imagine compatibility won’t be an issue. But, do you know what was the worst point? Firefox 4 stopped showing me the latest version of this blog, the right hand sidebar kept vanishing, the widgets went all screwy and with perhaps with a slight ironic twist: the “Get Firefox” widget simply failed to materialise!!!

For a few months I have been paying an average rate to my current web hosts Catalyst2 for a reasonably good service and for what can only be described as a minimal amount of web space. 750 Mb in this day and age is a bit miserly!

Also my current web hosts make no eco-claims of planting new trees, running their server room off wind turbines or solar power or anything other than “we leave everything powered up all night!”.

Now as someone that doesn’t usually float with the popular fashions and tides I wouldn’t normally buy into this eco-conscious wave that seems to be spreading erm like a big … sorry I’m out of analogies here..Anyway, it did spring to mind that as the aim of this site is essentially green in nature – and when I do my southport walks then I really can claim to be carbon neutral, then perhaps the fact that there is essentially a server or two running 24/7 with me as one of the reasons as to why it’s running 24/7 then maybe it was time to get a bit consciency!

So, those reasons above are what has driven me to put my current web hosts on a months notice. At the end of April – just at the same time as the big walk around Winter and Great hills, I’ll be moving my name servers across to an eco-friendly, carbon neutral web hosting company

So from April onwards, if this site takes any longer to load than it formerly has …breathe out a bit harder will you

In this case it refers to my earlier post this month pertaining to the moving of the site content from the general and generic home page to the blog. I stated also that the blog would stay where it was – in its’ own folder…well that was the idea but once I had downloaded and installed this excellent “Weaver” WordPress® theme then I simply had to make a ‘showcase’ of it. I think that you’ll agree that the site has never looked quite so … nice! I have had positive feedback in person from a number of sources and although I didn’t create the template myself – I feel proud of it, and that makes a welcome change.

The old “hills” section does still exist, I have no desire to take it down just yet. I like the way that I worked out the coding and used style sheets to display the content just where I wanted it to be displayed. The images on the other site have to go and for the most part I am moving them to the hill description here on the blog. It is a shame to lose them, so when I have finished updating all of this part of the site I shall then return to there and paste the URLs of the images in the matching place holders there. This I would not have to do if I had more web space. Herein lies the problem.

My hosting account at Catalyst2 only affords me 750Mb of storage – a puny amount by today’s standards and if I want more then I have to double my annual budget – if I stay with Catalyst2! I am thus looking at changing web hosting company, this will mean that I have to start backing up all of my web sites – but for all the aggrovation of starting once more from scratch…backing up is not looking like such a bad idea! The grand move from /blog to / is now almost complete, I have just the West Pennines and the Lancashire plain files to create and then I can ease off with the page count, it has reached what I think is an high number.

After all this upheaval I can barely wait to get back to the beautiful slopes of dear old Pendle once more