Is this thing on?

I’m cautiously optimistic that switching to a new host will have solved the problems I talked about over here. Then again, after 8 hours of setting things up and adjusting and seeing my site crash and about a half-dozen chat sessions with customer service, cautious optimism might be … well, too optimistic. We’ll see how that goes.

(Geeky aside: I was told by my new hosting company that I was “over consuming system resources” — I have a five-page website and this blog. We’re not talking about a complex and process-heavy web presence that places any sort of undue pressure on a shared server. This is pretty simple stuff, about as simple as it gets. I can’t imagine that simple WordPress admin functions constitute “over consuming system resources,” so I’ll keep an eye on things for the immediate future. I really hope it doesn’t go south; switching to a new host is a bigger pain in the ass than losing a wallet.)

In any event, I’m not going back to blogging daily. The immediate plan: Post something occasionally, when it feels like there’s something worth saying. We’ll see how that goes, too.

… for a while, at least.

This blog is built on WordPress, and every day since June 12, 2005, I’ve posted something here. That amounts to three or four halfway-decent blog posts and a lot of crap, but it also adds up to a lot of time spent posting here.

On most days, when the tubes of the interwebs aren’t experiencing extreme sclerosis, posting something here generally takes just a few minutes. Lately though, something’s been happening at my site host where that thing that should take a few minutes takes nearly an hour. The issue has been happening on and off for nearly a year — every few months, the blog becomes inaccessible for several weeks. I can’t afford to keep wasting the time it takes to deal with the hosting company to straighten it out, and I can’t afford to spend an hour making a blog post that ought to take five minutes.

In the grand scheme of things, this blog is a tiny grain of sand on a giant beach. I don’t get a whole lot of traffic. But I do like the idea of blogging daily: There’s a structure and a discipline involved that I like, and knowing that I need to post something each day is a good incentive to check my news feeds and keep on top of developments in the worlds of UX, SEO, PR and a whole bunch of other acronyms.

The miniscule audience I have probably won’t notice I’m gone, but my daily routine will have changed significantly in a way that will fundamentally feel like a tiny step toward worse. I’m not crazy about that. I want to take steps toward things being better, not worse, but this latest iteration of this issue has gone on too long to deal with anymore. Time isn’t just money, it’s time I could be spending doing an infinite number of other things.

Maybe this issue will straighten out at some point in the near future. Maybe not. Until it does, though, I need to focus my time and energy elsewhere. As is said in the circus: See you down the road.

This is the most ridiculous YouTube compilation I’ve ever seen: 10 Marx Bros. trailers. Odds are you’ll want to find the time to go watch three or four of these movies in full.

That’s what a Yahoo! supervisor told an angry T-Mobile customer when he complained of receiving 50-60 SMS messages a day from them. Wrong answer — one that could cost Yahoo! $2.35 million in fines. MediaPost reports.