Growing Pains on Phoenix Real Estate Guy — The Phoenix Real Estate Guy

Since switching themes on Jan 16, I’ve been doinking with the underlying code — tweaking this, twisting that. It’s a sickness, and I’m having trouble stopping.

So far, there have only been two panic stricken moments where I thought I’d imploded the entire blog. Fortunately those moments were between 2:00 and 3:00am when most normal people are asleep and not reading, and I managed to recover quickly.

However, some time round about last Thursday I mangled something in the comments.php file and *poof* away went track/pingbacks. Attempting to debug that (with very minimal php skills) led to much frustration and cursing. Being stubborn led me to say, “I will fix this and will not resort to re-installing the original file!”

Well, time to swallow the pride. Original file re-installed (plus a few mods I know work) and the trackback functionality is alive and well.

But, if you pinged a post here between Thursday and this morning, your pingback isn’t showing up. This is a “do follow” blog, meaning you get “link love” if you ping here (as search spiders will follow the pingback links). So, if you want the link love you’re going to need to manually re-ping.

Sorry!

Next stop — hosting switch. GoDaddy’s shared server isn’t doing well at all handling a recent traffic surge. I’ve just got to decide which one (the choice right now is currently between Media Temple and BlueHost, though that can change on a whim).

Stay tuned, and thanks for reading!

Email This Post

Print This Post

Thanks for reading! We value your thoughts and opinions, so please feel free to leave a comment. Please contact us if you have any questions or need help. You can also get automatic updates for this blog free via:

Potentially Related Posts on Phoenix Real Estate Guy:

Gilbert: Fastest Growing Big Suburb in the Country

Metro Phoenix Leads Nation in Retail Construction

New Census Numbers Out: Phoenix and Gilbert Growing

Read this blog's Comment Policy

Brendan King

Jay, shouldn't you be selling real estate? Just kidding :)

Jay - The Phoenix Real Estate

But Brendan, I am selling real estate! ;)

Christina Ethridge

Jay - have you called GD? I believe they have dedicated servers available for purchase. If their shared servers are giving you a headache, so will others. They also can move you to a server with less active sites on it.

Jay - The Phoenix Real Estate

Christina - yeah, I've spent some quality time on the phone with GD. Their normally stellar customer service was not-so-good. They blame the problems on WordPress. A quick perusal of the WP forums shows lots of issues with GD hosting. (though surely tens of thousands of WP blgos are hosted by GD).

They do have dedicated servers, but honestly, while the traffic increase here has been significant relative to what it was, a thousand uniques a day should only be a very minor blip to a webhost. Their dedicated servers are a little pricey compared to what you can get with others. Media Temple has a pretty cool sounding "hybrid" technology that's sort of a cross between shared and dedicated servers.

Good idea about seeing if they can move me to another server. I'll try that next. I really don't want to change hosts because it's such a PITA.

Christina Ethridge

I REALLY don't want to hear this - I am literally smack in the middle of transferring all of our websites and blogs over to GD's hosting services - and I use WP. But I'll torture myself and keep an eye on how it's going with you.

Chris Butterworth

Hi Jay,

A couple quick thoughts for you - even though you've probably already researched them..

1. Have you tried Crystaltech for hosting? They're a little bit pricey, but we're talking about a few bucks a month. They're super reliable, and their customer service is over-the-top. And they're a local company! I've used them for over 4 years now, on lots of different domains, and have never had a complaint.

2. I'm going to do a write-up on my blog tomorrow about a new blog I just finished building. (non-real estate blog, more of a hobby/community give-back project). But we built the entire thing on the blogengine.net (www.dotnetblogengine.net) platform - using REGULAR HTML instead of PHP files!! I love it! (email me offline if you want & I'll send you a sneak preview).

Just my $0.02...

Shannon

Hey Jay!! Just testing to make sure I did this right!

Benn

Jay, a thought here, why dont you try #E9EFEB as the background, it would pop a narly effect with your header...

Jay - The Phoenix Real Estate

Benn - Excellent! Were you thinking background along the sides (as I've done now), or background in the main area (that's white now). I tried it in the main blog area and it seemed a little much. I am really not good with color schemes. Wide open to any suggestions a talented man such as yourself may have!

Benn

Well, as you know, we talented people have fantastic tools at our disposal that help us with such things as color :p

I think the blue tone on the sides really softens the look. If I changed anything about this theme is I would soften the dark edges, maybe reduce the px width to .5 or 1

Your balance is off because if you notice all of the titles of this theme have a grey background, either drop them, or you need to match the menu with them to balance, that will create that symmetry you're looking for- kinda crazy, but I might lose that light shade of grey and go with that ##E9EFEB all across the board with menus and title backgrounds, that would really balance things out.

But you know how this goes, you really just gotta tinker...

cassiano travareli

well when you were up between 2 and 3am figuring out your problems, well that's a good thing. That's when one of your best ideas come up. Ive had many of those happen to me.