Some Blog News: We’re Now Hosted by Justia!
[Apologies if you’re seeing this a second time]
The blog has been on an unscheduled and unannounced hiatus for the past few weeks. The hiatus partially reflects the holidays and my need to finish grading over 200 student papers. However, mostly it’s due to some major backend issues with the blog.
I’ll spare you the details, but the blog melted down twice in Fall–first when we tried to switch to HTTPS, and second when we got hit by a pernicious spider that spiked server usage, which caused the blog host HostGator to unceremoniously and without any warning turn off the blog (and all of my other sites). Needless to say, I was not thrilled by HostGator’s customer “service,” which guaranteed I would become an ex-customer. However, I lacked the expertise to solve the problem myself. In desperation, I put out a request on social media for professional help to get me back online and fix my backend issues.
Tim Stanley and the Justia team rode to my rescue. They got me back online quickly and then offered to permanently take over my blog/website administration on exceptionally generous terms. I can’t thank them enough!
I’m thrilled to announce that today we switched the nameservers from HostGator to Justia-operated servers, so Justia is now hosting the blog instead of HostGator. This is incredibly good news for Venkat and me as bloggers and for you as readers. The switch won’t change too much, but here are some changes to note:
* if you see anything broken, please email me (egoldman@gmail.com) so we can look into it and get it fixed!
* my personal blog, currently located at https://personal.ericgoldman.org, will relocate to http://personal.ericgoldman.org. (The “nested” blog-within-a-blog URL was a major source of the backend problems). It may take some time for this change to occur. This URL change may break the RSS feed, so if you subscribe via RSS, you may need to resubscribe at the new URL. You can also get posts emailed; I only post at my personal blog a few times a year.
* In the near future, we will be migrating the blog and other sites to HTTPS (as I had hoped to do in Fall before the prior conversion attempt broke the blog).
* Though Justia hasn’t required it of us, we’ll probably add some promotion for them as a small token of appreciation
I’ll close this post with a request and a thank you. The request: if you have any suggestions of how we can make the blog more helpful to you, I’d love to hear it. With the extra muscle of Justia’s team, it may be possible to do some backend work that wasn’t possible previously. And finally the thank you: we’re coming up on the 13 year anniversary of this blog, and I know many of you have been reading for a long time. Thank you for your continued readership and support for the blog. Happy new year!