Though I’m not bald!

I thought I’d just go post on the new Substack I had (sort of) set up. I expected to just fiddle around a bit. find the levers and buttons, and up would go my first post.

Hmmm. I soon realized that this is going to require a learning curve. And, needless to say, picking up a new technology for a decrepit Boomer who’d been at Woodstock is not quite as speedy a process as it is for somebody aged 20.

I will keep readers here informed.

Today is the 19th Anniversary of the beginning of the Never Yet Melted blog.

I’ve done 17,902 posts before this one and had millions of readers in countries all over the world. The exact count has been lost because NYM has outlived all the original statcounters.

At its peak, I had 30-50 thousand readers a month.

My blogging efforts have declined in response to the decline of blog significance. Competition from social media, like X, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, and Substack, has taken away much of our former traffic.

Also, I am increasingly fed up with the WordPress nerds’ feckless updates which wipe out foreign accents and special characters (like apostrophes, quotation marks, and M and N dashes, substituting gobbledy-gook and which change image link formats thereby making all older postings imageless.

Google and some other ads used to cover partially my server costs, but the other ad sources died and Google gave me an ultimatum about removing the Charlie Hebdo Mohammed cartoons, so I told Google “Gotz von Berlichingen!“.

In fact, I have decided to switch over to Substack myself. I’m thinking of writing one or two original essays a week myself and giving up daily blog posts.

Look for an announcement of my first Substack post very soon, and do subscribe.

Thanks to everyone for your past support,

David

Eight days after our satellite internet connection went down, Viasat got a technician out to the Central Pennsylvania farm to deal with the problem. We pay hundreds and hundreds per month for “business” level services and this is what support service is like.

But, don’t worry! Viasat will cancel charges for the days our connection was down. Of course, the service call results in a $200 extra charge.

For the benefit of commenters: Starlink is not available for my location. Our alternative is Hughesnet, which is not really any better.

This kind of thing, a vital system component wearing out and expiring, does happen every four or five years, and repair servics are always excruciatingly slow.

My no-good wife brought COVID home from one of her choral groups and gave it to me. I’ve been sleeping a lot and feeling sorry for myself and took a vacation from blogging. My apologies.

The outage is affecting customers over most of the country. Rumors claim a train derailed and set on fire an Exede facility somewhere in Texas or Washington state or Illinois or Canada, a cable was damaged and the authorities will not allow techs to enter to make repairs. Who knows?

What seems even more strange is the complete lack of media coverage.

A sudden high wind brought down the top of an ancient hemlock next to our 1812 Central Pennsylvania log cabin.

No power, no water, no air conditioning in July, no Internet. Down in Virginia, we had a back-up generator, but outages are usually short in Pennsylvania and the farm was just a vacation place.

It was windy. Trees came down, and we’ve been sitting with no power for a couple of days. You don’t realize how dependent on electrical power you are until you don’t have any.

Down in Virginia, we had a back-up generator. Our PA farm was always just a vacation place and, besides, power is usually very reliable and service restoration quick here in PA. Not so much this time.

Temporarily Locked on Top.

About six months ago, it suddenly became the case that you had to do something every 90 days to update your SSL Certificate, or else anyone logging onto your web page got redirected to a warning that yours is an insecure site.

It took several occurrences before it dawned on my dim reptilian intelligence that this unhappy state of affairs was going to keep happening and steps needed to be taken to avoid it. When I looked into it, my hosting company explained that I could switch to a different hosting plan on a different server for a few bucks more per month.

Sure, I said, Let’s do that.

Well, they took their time, and moved NYM on Thanksgiving Day. Chaos ensued. Connecting to NYM commonly produced 103 — Bandwidth Exceeded errors, and trying to upload a post crashed WordPress.

It turned out that they offered me a plan with hardly any bandwidth, completely inadequate for NYM’s traffic. And changing servers resulted in several plugins acting up and causing everything to crash.

I used to get great support from Hostica, but this time I was left hanging with no responses. So I pulled the plug on Hostica.

I moved over to a new hosting company, which it turns out, amusingly, is in Lithuania. (I’m of Lithuanian descent, you see.)

Things are not entirely different. I’ve been discovering that, nowadays, these hosting companies all seem to expect to you go to their site and fiddle with the mechanics of it all yourself. Since the need arises once every five years or so, one’s personal familiarity with all this is lacking.

So… the migration has been done, and NYM’s new Name Server Address has finally propagated (It can take 48 hours). It is not crashing so far. And I set up SSL so you should not get warnings. The only problem is that I seem to have lost a couple of days recent postings.

More surprises may be in store, but I think the worst is over.

Sigh, I used to be hosted by this religious fanatic nerd in Texas. I could just phone Ed, and Ed would fix whatever. Unfortunately, somebody hired Ed for a real IT job and part of the deal included Ed giving up moonlighting as a hosting service.

UPDATE: I just found that I’ve got the blog from yesterday sitting on an open browser page, so now I can just, laboriously, reload all the missing postings.

I had to get the NYM site moved to a different (higher-priced) server in order to cause the Security Certificate to be automatically updated every 90 days, so as to avoid warnings from your browers about this being an “insecure site.”

Like most moves, it produced some problems, and –of course!– all this naturally occurred over the Thanksgiving Holiday long weekend when hosting service support is thin on the ground.

Please be patient. All this will be resolved.

The warning you see is not really valid.

All browsers now require an SSL (= “Secure Sockets Layer”) Security Certificate which, depending on your host’s system, may need to be renewed every three months.

I’m trying to get moved to an automatically renewing system.

It doesn’t happen very often at all, but today Never Yet Melted’s host servers were down for quite a long time. Sooner or later, it happens to everyone. I’ve seen Instapundit off-line a couple of times.

My apologies.

I have compiled all the comments on this web-site loading slowly below, so that potential technical support can have a handy reference.

My own observations:

I have no clue what the problem some people (and only some people) seem to be having could be.

I use Chrome for blogging and I look at the blog all the time in Chrome, and it loads normally for me. My wife finds no problem either.

I did reduce the number of posts on page one which should slightly speed things up.

I now intend to ask for technical advice.

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2018/10/09 at 5:51 pm:

Your website has become really, really slow. Last few days. So slow sometimes I just cancel the load and go somewhere else.

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2018/10/11 at 3:03 pm:

Thursday, 10/11, 3:00 p.m. EST: unusable. 1:16 (one minute, 16 seconds) for your page to load once the name resolution completed. Just as long to access this comment page. No problems with any other websites.

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2018/10/13 at 9:42 am:

It’s working well now! Much, much better.

I’ve been using both Chrome and Safari on a Mac – operating system and browsers all latest versions. Chrome has been flakey with High Sierra, but the slow load was only your site, until last night.

You can email me to discuss offline if you like, and I’m happy to provide feedback going forward.

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2018/10/13 at 5:55 pm:

I spoke too soon. Now, almost 6:00 p.m. Saturday, it’s back to 1:16 from clicking the comment link to the page load.

Something’s very wrong.

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2018/10/13 at 10:06 pm:

Update: right now it’s really, really slow on Chrome and Safari, but
speedy on Firefox.

Mac OS X 10.13.6 (High Sierra)
Chrome Version 69.0.3497.100 (Official Build) (64-bit)
Safari Version 12.0 (13606.2.11)
Firefox 62.0.3 (64-bit)
(I believe these are all latest versions)

I can’t explain it.

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2018/10/16 at 7:33 am:

I know, it’s weird. I tried it again just now, it seemingly NEVER loads on Safari, and takes forever on Chrome, but it’s speedy with Firefox. As I said, latest Mac OS, latest Chrome, latest Safari, latest Firefox. The browser status when it’s taking a long time is “Connecting….” It eventually connects, but ever page load to your blog takes as long.

I’d really like to know if it’s me, what it is!

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2018/10/16 at 12:24 pm:

On Chrome on my home desktop has been loading slowly for a week or two.

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2018/10/16 at 11:42 am:

Use Chrome . No issues .

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2018/10/16 at 5:23 pm:

on Safari it has stopped loading all together when I click my bookmark. But if I manually type in url it will load. On Chrome it loads very slowly but eventually does load.

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2018/10/16 at 5:59 pm:

Usually access using Android phone with Chrome. Has been exceeding slow to load the last couple weeks but is ok after it does.
Tried it with Brave which I recently installed. Handshake took a few seconds but loaded quickly. Never had an issue with Firefox on laptop.

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2018/10/16 at 6:50 pm:

It is just fine on Firefox but videos linked from facebook don’t even show on the page.

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2018/10/16 at 7:05 pm:

Chrome… about two weeks ago it started to go very slow. Takes about 30 seconds to open the home page. Clicking here just now to comment also took another 30 seconds.

But like the old catsup commercial… anticipation was worth it.

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2018/10/19 at 12:44 pm:

Loads like ye olde greased lightning.