Hello all!
I know it's been a few days. I am preparing for a class in anglo saxon pottery I'm teaching here at home in my pottery studio.
Also, I spent the end of last week working 14 hours straight on a submission project to a BIG deal job. And they didn't think the submission was quite what they were looking for (which depressed me all weekend) but they did say that they would spend the weekend compiling feedback for what needed worked on. Which indicates they're still considering me for the job. It's a long term project that could keep me in regular illustration work for the next 3 years. So I am crossing my fingers.
Plus I have had major drama with my long time web host.
The long time web host bears further explanation and a beg for your sufference. In about 4 days all graphics of mine anywhere will go down for approximately 3 days while my main account propagates with a new host.
I have been with Open Source Hosting for about 10 years. I am probably one of their oldest remaining customers, many having moved on, as folks tend to do. But I've been with them since they were a smaller company making waves as the special host for the geek savvy. Only over the last few years they have really cost me. Not just in elevated hosting fees, but in moves to servers where they destroyed website builds they then were disinclined or unable to repair, etc. And this weekend was the last Straw. I needed them to install Wordpress for me because I was going to create, among other things, a webcomic format for viewing Winter's Solace. So I needed not only wordpress, but the webcomic plugin for it. The tech folks were rude and dismissive and then not only that, the Wordpress install ended up glitchy. And to top things off, my host wasn't running a current enough version of PHP to even manage the webcomic plugin for Wordpress. They're running something insanely outdated...PHP 4.6 or some such silliness! And when I asked for backups of my websites and databases, they ignored me.
So I started shopping. And after much market research and then narrowing the cream of the crop down to those that were domestic to the US, I then narrowed the field further to host companies that didn't outsource jobs to India, AND then finally I sorted them by which companies were at least attempting to run "green". THat left me with a very small list... The host company of those that remained that had the best reputation for good customer service and tech support was called HostGator. So I went with them. ANd wow... They were great! THat is what I missed. Patient, openminded tech service that didn't assume you were an idiot just because you asked a question.
I had to get a new ftp client though... because the darn one in Vista would not detect their IP, so file transferring was not happening.
Long and short of it, visuals will be shut down everywhere soon, but only for a few days. It will take me a while to get in there and change the link addresses on everything and propogation takes a while. I already have duplicate files moved to my new server.
So don't panic! It won't take long to get back to normal once I do down.
Hugs!