kartooner.com

It’s been several months since I’ve written on here, since August of last year in fact, which equals to roughly 5 years in Internet time.

What have I been up to since I last mashed my fingers across the keyboard and published something of worth? Well, I was offered and accepted a position with AOL/Weblogs, Inc. as a designer for their network of sites. My first thought was; they pay people to design blogs? It’s become more than a dream job for me and I couldn’t be more thankful for the friendships I’ve formed and lessons learned.

There’s that, on the job end of things, and as a far as my personal life is concerned we’re plugging along quite nicely. My daughter Zoe just turned 4. For those of you who’ve followed this site for the 4+ years I’ve been maintaining it this is a huge milestone. My son, Quinn, is now 2 and between the two they manage to keep us busy, thanks in part to how often they annoy each other. We are expecting another child as well so there are more adventures to look forward to.

Speaking of which, this site, my favorite pet project has become more stagnant than ever. You could search the archives… oh wait, no you can’t because that’s yet to be fixed, but hey, if you could you’d find plenty of posts describing some sort of post-mortem. Moving on from here I’ve finally decided to use Expression Engine to use as the engine of this site. One reason for settling on EE is because I’ve used it sparingly in the past for projects and the road map of feature additions & interface enhancements (as showcased at SXSW ‘08) looks pretty fantastic.

The other reason is I had dinner with Michael Boyink, recent hire of Ellis Labs (the team behind EE), and through his own articulation and excitement I myself became utterly convinced this was for me. He’s also the man behind Train-EE which is both an incredible and informative resource on all that is Expression Engine, oh, and he offers training course ware on it. How cool is that?

It’s been awhile and I realize that and it bothers me, but, it’s clear to me that the progression of this site is to become something more than a blog, but also it needs to be fun again for me.

After much deliberation and temporary insanity I’ve moved this site to its new home at MediaTemple.

The neighbors here are pretty great. No cookies yet, but lawns are mowed, my mailbox is still standing and I’ve since removed the RamboLux security system. I kept the guard dog however so intruders beware!

My mail carrier is some friendly chap named Google. He’s helpful but the guard dog keeps a watchful eye in his direction.

For the time being the grid is stable and all my stuff is in order, save for a broken Mint. That’s okay though, I’ll just fix that later because I’ve got other fish to fry.

With that, I’m all out of clichés and my back is a bit sore.

If you have any comments, just slide them under the door.

P.S. - Remodeling is long overdue so please excuse any future mess.

For those who aren’t aware Dreamhost experienced a security breach. According to Dreamhost, approximately 3,500 accounts were compromised, the hackers taking note of FTP user accounts, user names and passwords.

With this data the hackers, using an automated script of some sort, added SEO links/inframes to every instance of index.html or php.

This is the last straw. I’ve been with Dreamhost since mid-2004 and recommended them on more than one occasion and even went so far as defending them when others complained about slow service or half-baked customer support, the latter being something I never experienced.

Not any more. It’s time to look for a new home.

Over the past two hours I’ve had to comb over my files, looking for anything that could have been stolen and to my knowledge some files might have been removed.

Not only that, but the password I used was one of the best passwords I’ve used in a long time and now, thanks to this, I have to piece together a franken-mash of numbers.

It’s sad because while I represent, according to DH, only .15% of the customers whose data was changed in some way, I just wish something could’ve been done to prevent this.

Yet, who am I to say that web hosting is safe from this kind of thing, which apparently it isn’t. I suppose I wanted to believe that they were impenetrable, even if that was a premature wish.

The culprits added inframes and linkage pointing to offshore sites displaying garbled information; SEO tactics indeed.

On the bright side of things, my entries are safe, every one of them accounted for since 2004. This wasn’t an issue really considering I’ve kept backups of my DB since the beginning and make it habit to do it frequently.

I’m also planning on moving to a new CMS and will be taking the entries with me to preserve for the future, when robots make swiss cheese sandwiches with George Forman machines.

Does anyone out there have any suggestions for a new host?

If you couldn’t tell by the lack of writing, I’m once again (maybe twice now) consumed by life’s responsibilities that I haven’t had much time to commit to this “blog” as I’ve had in the past.

The lack of TLC is attributed to several things, many of which are related to working a 40-hour work week as well as taking courses in the evening. Mix that in with everything else and you can begin to see why there hasn’t been much activity here in over a month.

Instead of allowing this site to transition from a state of limbo to complete neglect, I’ve decided to take a break from blogging for the time being. I can’t say exactly how long this will last, but rest assured it’ll only be a short break to effectively reboot myself.

When I do eventually return, I’ll also reboot this site as well, giving it a complete makeover but without Ty Pennington of course.

Thanks for reading. Have a great summer.

I’ll be seeing you again soon.