Around about a month ago I started to hit problems with this Wordpress and Yahoo! Small Business based blog. The problem seemed to occur initially when I had a deluge of spam comments that weren't trapped by Akismet. I won't go in to all of the details, but I got mightily frustrated by two things. The first is that Yahoo! Small Business are not a good choice for your Wordpress blog. Although they have a one click install, essentially they don't support Wordpress or PHP. The problem is made worse by the fact that their very well trained and professional call handlers have only been given knowledge in a narrow band of expertise - over the course of the problems I spoke to more than half a dozen of them, so my opinion is based on a representative sample. They regularly need to go and consult a second level expert, who you never get access to. Worse still, if the issue is to do with your MySQL database, then you can only speak to that team by e-mail, with a 24 hour turnaround if you are lucky.
The second frustrating thing was that Yahoo! Support said that the problem was with Wordpress and the associated PHP scripts, so I should go to the WP support forum for help. The WP support forum said that the problems were database issues that my hosting provider should sort out. Have you seen the Simpson's Movie trailer where Homer is bouncing between a large rock and bar called "A Hard Place"? Doh!
While I was away in Bulgaria last week visiting Blogtronix and ConsultCommerce, their absolutely fantastic hospitality extended to getting Vesil Chernev, their systems administrator, to take a look for me. He did some tweaking, deactivated two plug in - WP-Cache and BAStats - and things returned to normal. He highlighted that Yahoo! is on both an old version of Wordpress, and an old version of PHP. I'll be moving to a new hosting provider very soon.
But all of that means I'm back blogging. Spending time fiddling with technical issues, rather than writing was a real pain. Even though I'm writing over at blognation, I hope to maintain things here and get back to my regular posting rhythm.
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