BlunderDome Disruption

I’m consolidating all of the nfoCentrale web sites (this blog is on one of them) on a single web hosting account at A2 Hosting.  I have already moved most of my sites to that account, with only minor breakage around Apache case sensitivity.  Sites that have blogs or that have e-mail accounts are trickier to move and I have saved those for last.  Today, the movers are coming to Orcmid’s Lair, the BlunderDome, and Professor von Clueless.  And of course, neither last nor least, Spanner Wingnut’s Muddleware Lab.

{tags: orcmid A2 Hosting nfoCentrale web hosting Apache system incoherence confirmable experience Ed Bott}

What this means for the readers of these blogs is that the best reception will be found at URLs like http://orcmid.com/BlunderDome/clueless and not http://nfocentrale.net/orcmid/BlunderDome/clueless.  In fact, the second URL and the site feed at the same location will be not see any more blog updates for several weeks.   So what else is new, you say?  Change to use the new location when I say “ready” over there and we’ll see.

The Professor von Clueless blog and feed at http://orcmid.com/BlunderDome/clueless will see little or no interruption.  There may be some breakage, with templates, links, images, and archive pages having problems until the construction crew can straighten things out. 

The longer-term benefit is that URLs like http://orcmid.com will no longer forward to a different URL.  Instead, all nfoCentrale sites will have full-size, grown-up, first-class, independent domains with sites to match.   Now bookmarks made to pages found through orcmid.com follow the site wherever it may happen to be hosted in the future.

Well, what does all of this have to do with Spanner Wingnut?  Naturally, this blog is the place where momentous changes to the nfoCentrale blogs are supposed to happen first.  And that is how it will go.

First, the orcmid.com site (now showing at nfoCentrale.net/orcmid) will be completely backed up, including all three blogs on that site: Orcmid’s Lair, Professor von Clueless, and your humble Spanner Wingnut’s Muddleware Lab. 

All of that material will be dropped off at a new anchor site location, nfoCentrale.com/orcmid.  Yes indeed, I registered a new domain just to pull all of this off.  And no, the orcmid directory isn’t there just yet.  Patience, pulleeeze.

Then, after nosing around to make sure nothing terribly bad happens in the new site (mainly related to case-sensitivity differences between Apache and the Microsoft Internet Information Server, IIS), orcmid.com will be hosted as its own full-fledged domain that happens to get its content from, ahem, orcmid.nfocentrale.com (also not there yet, but keep watching) which, if you haven’t already guessed, gets its content from nfocentrale.com/orcmid.  Tricky but effective.

I’m so excited!  I’ve been waiting for years to accomplish what I just learned is called add-on domain hosting.  And now I can.  All because Ed Bott gave a testimonial to A2 Hosting on his blog page.