Apolo­gies for what’s been a bumpy cou­ple of days here, as Michael’s host­ing begins the shift to a FreeBSD-based server (for shared host­ing… his own website’s been run­ning off it for some time now).

Just to make things per­fectly clear, he’s host­ing this web­site for free, and it’s absolutely incred­i­ble most of the time (espe­cially con­sid­er­ing it’s run­ning off a con­sumer Inter­net connection!) — but it’s likely to have been a slightly spo­radic time in terms of being able to access things, and in terms of things work­ing prop­erly… for exam­ple, the Pho­to­Stack RSS feed and page itself was out the other day, which I’d have attrib­uted to a lack of lib_xml and/or GD(2) sup­port, but appar­ently this was just the fault of a cer­tain per­mis­sions acci­dent. Sim­i­larly, send­mail (or the equiv­a­lent being used) was out as a result of per­mis­sions — appar­ently it’s back up, but the con­tact form (which, inci­den­tally, needs a recode) still isn’t work­ing, and nei­ther (so far as I can tell) is my mod­er­a­tion update emails.

For you, dear reader, this sim­ply means that the con­tact form is tem­porar­ily out of action, and your com­ments may take slightly longer than usual to approve (yes, at this stage, all com­ments are being man­u­ally approved, to effec­tively com­bat spam. I’ll review the sit­u­a­tion when­ever I get around to switch­ing to 1.5 — prob­a­bly some time in the next two weeks).

Tags: consumer Internet connection, FreeBSD, XML