Category: Mon Valley Miscellany || By

Depending on where you get your Internet service, you may or may not be able to see tubecityonline.com right now; checking one set of name servers this morning, I found the domain was alive again. But a different set of name servers was still telling people the domain was down.

(UPDATE: Obviously if you can read this, you're in the right place.)

So, we're staying in business at the same old location for now. It sometimes takes 48 to 72 hours for a domain name to "propagate" throughout the Internet. (The series of tubes gets clogged, I guess.)

If you need some Tube City Online content (a sudden desire for information about tinplate production, for example) you can get there directly and bypass the DNS server:

http://208.22.38.250/tubecityonline/

. . .

Also, if I haven't mentioned this lately, I should: Derrick Brashear has hosted Tube City Online for free for more than 10 years. He has fielded countless late-night and weekend tech support calls and emails and has never complained or asked for a dime.

When he's been out of town on a few occasions and the Dementia server has decided to go toes-up, he's even roped friends and cow-orkers into fixing problems.

I can't possibly thank him enough ... but thank you, Derrick!

. . .

As for me, I spent the weekend exporting about 700 Almanac entries from Movable Type into Pivot. About 80 percent of them made the move automatically, without a problem. The other 20 percent drove me right up the fershlugginer wall, becauise I had to import them by hand.

Now I know why so many people just abandon their old blogs and start over.

By the way: I have been pretty happy with MT for the last three years, but Pivot was the choice of Tom Schroll, who maintains the server where tubecityonline.com is housed.

Though I'm pretty pleased with it so far, I'm sure I'll be complaining soon. (I always am.)

. . .

Already Pivot has shown that it has "quirks" like any other software package. For instance, after futzing with the Almanac for days and days last week, Pivot suddenly decided it didn't want to maintain monthly archives any more. It seems like the "weekly archive" feature is still working, so when (if?) the Almanac moves, it'll have weekly archives for a while.

I'm still fixing a few things --- mainly moving comments that MT wouldn't export or Pivot wouldn't import for whatever goofy reasons --- and your continuing patience is appreciated.

Just in case this drags on for more than a day or two, I'm thinking about getting a couple of guys to stand around with shovels and orange barrels.