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GoDaddy (Rant in the making? perhaps)

Colin Stasiuk — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:44:28 +0000

So I’m using GoDaddy to host both BenchmarkITConsulting.com as well as a new page I’m making for the SQL PASS Edmonton Chapter (EDMPASS.com). When I installed WordPress (v 2.7.0) using the “automagical” install provided by GoDaddy I started to make EDMPASS into what I was looking for. I started installing my theme of choice, my plugins, etc. I found a new plugin for something to do with comments. Put a test comment in and I didn’t receive any notification. weird. So deactive and remove the plugin entirely… another comment and still no notification.

Just for fun I went to this page and posted a test comment and to my suprise (and disappointment) I didn’t receive an email notification from this site either. *sigh*. So because I know the first thing GoDaddy is going to ask me to do is uninstall/reinstall I did that on EDMPASS.com (hense the nice default wordpress installation page that’s there right now). So no plugins, no themes, no nothing (yes I said no nothing… get over it) and I posted a comment and yeah… base install, no changes/customizations of anykind and no email comment notifications.

Just to make sure I checked my “discussion” settings and …

as expected and configured but just not working

So I emailed GoDaddy:

Customer Inquiry

Name : Colin Stasiuk
Phone :
Domain Name : edmpass.com
Browser Info : Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5.21022; .NET CLR 3.5.30428; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; MS-RTC LM

Other : WordPress 2.7.0

Base install… no widgets, plugins, etc added.

Not receiving comment notifications via email.

Please let me know what is required to make this work. (receive email on comments is checked to true)

And as I expected I got the:

Dear Colin Stasiuk,

Thank you for contacting Online Support.

I understand you have a question about comment notifications that you are not receiving from WordPress. Please uninstall and reinstall the blog software to insure that no files were corrupted in the original install process. I have included instructions to do so:

(don’t worry I wont paste the whole thing)

So I figured HEY… I’ll play the game and uninstall/reinstall AGAIN and comment email notifications again did not work.

So I’m replying to the incident with the following:

Still no comment notifications being sent to my email after complete uninstall/reinstall of wordpress 2.7.0

attached is a screenshot of my new installation comment notification settings.

Please advise asap how to resolve this issue as I’ve also noticed that one of my other domains hosted at GoDaddy (BenchmarkITConsulting.com) that is on wordpress 2.7.0 is also no longer receiving email notifications. I have since upgraded to 2.7.1 (via GoDaddy automated upgrade) and am still experiencing the same behavior (no email notification on comments)

Thanks

Colin

Stay tuned for further updates… (feel free to comment but don’t expect me to reply right away cause I’m not receiving email notifications right now… but I think I mentioned that somewhere LOL *sigh*)

P.S. I will write a glowing review of GoDaddy if I don’t have to wait 24 hours again before someone gets back to me. It will be even more glowing if they can actually help resolve my problem

UPDATE (8:36 am MST): BenchmarkITConsulting.com is receiving notifications again…. still nothing for EDMPASS…. stay tuned lol

UPDATE (1:03 pm MST): Apparently I’m on my own

Dear Colin Stasiuk,

I apologize for the inconvenience. Please make sure that you are using ‘relay-hosting.secureserver.net’ as the relay server for sending mail through the application. Furthermore, it may be necessary to install a plugin to allow the application to use an external relay server. For more information on finding and using this plugin, please check the Word Press forums.

Please let us know if we can be of any further assistance.

Online Support Technician

Hmmmm weird… so even though Benchmark IT Consulting is NOW getting email comment notifications apparently to get EDMPASS.com working with email notifications I need to find a plugin (no link, no recommendations, no anything) to use an external relay and that I should check out WordPress forums (no link, no recommendations, no anything)

So basically they washed their hands and told me to find a “workaround” on my own.

WORKAROUND

Enter WP-MAIL-SMTP (hey look at that… a link to try and be helpful)

From Email Address: (I created a new email addy to do the SMTPing)

From Name: WordPress

Mailer: Send all WordPress emails via SMTP

SMTP Host: smtpout.secureserver.net

SMTP Port: 80

Encryption: No Encryption

Authentication: Yes: Use SMTP Authentication

username: my new email addy for SMTPing

password: *******

So I got it working with not alot of help from GoDaddy (and I think that’s being “nice”). Disappointed with the service at this point. I plan on replying with my “fix” but requesting the ticket remain open until they can tell me why BenchmarkITConsulting.com doesn’t require this workaround and EDMPASS.com does.

Stay Tuned

WordPress changes my T-SQL code again :(

Colin Stasiuk — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 15:41:13 +0000

Sorry for the lack of updates today (and probably tomorrow)… For some reason my single quotes ‘ in my T-SQL code have changed back to grave accents `.

I wrote about this a while back http://benchmarkitconsulting.com/colin-stasiuk/2008/11/06/wordpress-messes-up-code-in-blogs-fix-included/ and had to go back and change all my other blog entries and made sure my future ones were good to go as well. Today I started writing a blog and thought.. hmm this sounds familar I think I’ve blogged about this before and when I went back to look at my old blogs I was met with the grave accents (that are going to put me in my grave I’m sure LOL )

Tonight I’m going to work on a MySQL script to run against my WordPress database to do some searching and replacing… mental note I’m not a MySQL guru so best to backup my database before trying to cowboy my way to a solution hahaha

If I come up with something good I’ll be sure to post it as opening each blog entry manually and doing a search and replace with the HTML is NOT fun.

Tracking/Securing your User Names and Passwords

Colin Stasiuk — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 15:01:36 +0000

So how do YOU do it? (not a rhetorical question… I really want to know )

I use a free tool (insert witty “boy is he cheap” joke here) called Password Safe. It’s a great little tool for keeping track of the (as of this morning) 69 user names and passwords that I currently use. After all the recent hacking going on I all of a sudden got paranoid about some of my shared password that I use. I have 4 or 5 passwords that I use on a regular basis and I try and group them so my online banking passwords are never the same as the password I use for something like Twitter. I also try to go through and if the user is for either a website I don’t go to much anymore, etc I’ll usually go to that website and change the password to something even more obscure then my normal passwords just to eliminate the sharing of passwords even more.

So that’s how I keep track of my passwords and my general rules of thumb… so what do you do?

Twitter DBA Community

Colin Stasiuk — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 21:37:23 +0000

Talk about missing out on an opportunity to touchbase with some of the great DBAs and people out there in the world. I tried for the longest time to avoid the whole “Twitter” world but after enough peer pressure I jumped in and I’m sure glad I did.

If you’re new to Twitter here is a great list DBAs on Twitter to get you started.

http://sqlserverpedia.com/wiki/Twitter

If you’ve been a DBA for a while I’m sure you’ve read articles written by alot of these people and although alot of the conversation doesn’t always apply to SQL Server there is some great discussions going on all the time.

I personally use http://www.tweetdeck.com/beta/ to stay on top of everything.

Anyways happy blogging and happy tweeting and feel free to check me out on Twitter at:

http://twitter.com/BenchmarkIT

SyncToy v2.0

Colin Stasiuk — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:48:09 +0000

If you follow my Twitter (don’t worry I wont tell anyone) you’ll know that I’ve been looking for a new sync tool now that I’m 64 bit at home. I used to use FileSync a nice free tool that was great for my needs other then the fact that if you synced files larger then 1 GB it would go to 100% and keep going and never stop. (Never looked into why too much as usually the only files that were quite large were VMs that I run so I just did those via batch.)

Once I setup my 64 bit machine and tried to install FileSync I realized (well the installer told me ) that it does not support 64 bit. So I was on a mission to find a new good free sync program. Now I know good and especially free doesn’t usually point you in a Microsoft direction but SyncToy v2.0 (so far anyways) seems to be a great little program that supports 64 bit and is FREE.

Here is a list of features from the Microsoft site that were added to release 2.0 of SyncToy:

Dynamic Drive Letter Assignment: Drive letter reassignment will now be detected and updated in the folder pair definition.

True Folder Sync: Folder creates, renames and deletes are now synchronized for all SyncToy actions.

Exclusion Filtering Based on Name: File exclusion based on name with exact or fuzzy matching.

Filtering Based on File Attributes: The ability to exclude files based on one or more file attributes (Read-Only, System, Hidden).

Unattended Folder Pair Execution: Addressed issues related to running scheduled folder pairs while logged off.

Folder Pairs With Shared Endpoints: Ability for folder pairs associated with the same or different instances of SyncToy to share end-points.

Command line enhancements: Added the ability to manage folder pairs via the command line interface.

Re-Architect Sync Engine: The SyncToy engine has been rearchitected to provide scalability and the ability to add significant enhancements in future releases.

Sync engine is also more robust insomuch that many single, file level errors are skipped without affecting the entire sync operation.

Sync Encrypted Files: Sync of Encrypted files works when local folder and files are encrypted, which addresses the common scenario involving sync between local, encrypted laptop PC folder and remote, unencrypted desktop PC folder.

64-Bit Support: SyncToy now has a native 64-bit build (x64 only) for 64-bit versions of Windows.

Folder pair rename

Sub-folder Exclusion Enhancements: Descendents created under excluded sub-folders are automatically excluded. Usability improvements for the sub-folder exclusion dialog.

Folder Pair Metadata Moved: Folder pair metadata removed from MyDocuments to resolve any issues with server-based folder pair re-direction setup.

Setup Improvements: Integrated setup with single self-extracting archive file and no extra downloads if you already have .NET Framework 2.0 installed. Enabled silent install for the SyncToy Installer file (see readme.txt file for more information). Removed combine and subscribe actions.

Removed combine and subscribe actions.

Anyways if someone has a better 64 bit and free file syncronize program out there please leave a comment and let me know but for now SyncToy v2.0 looks to be my 64 bit “syncing” solution.

Blackbird Browser?

Colin Stasiuk — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 19:40:08 +0000

http://blackbirdhome.com/

A new version of Mozilla has appeared, dubbed “Blackbird”. It’s a browser that offers features and content meant to appeal to members of the African-American (and possibly the African-Canadian) community.

“The company that developed Blackbird - a group called 40A Inc, says that the browser is designed to

[...] make it easier to find African American related content on the Internet and to interact with other members of the African American community online by sharing stories, news, comments and videos.

Through the use of embedded tools such as “Black Search”, Blackbird attempts to provide users with the best black content available on the web.”

I’m not really sure what to think about this… I’m sure once Blackbird is more mainstream there will be alot of debate on it but since when did race become a factor in web browsing? What’s next? WhiteLight? MellowYellow? BrownTown?

Personally when I browse for something I’m not looking for something from 1 point of view or that was written by someone of a particular race… how are we to judge arguements and ideas if the information we gather is geared towards a particular race?

Am I blind? Are web browsers made primarily for white people? What factors of IE, Firefox, etc are not geared to all races? Is this all a big marketing ploy? If it is well you got me cause it got me to write about it.

Do I have a problem with Blackbird? Nope… Do I see a reason/need for it? Nope. Would I use or care about a “WhiteLight” browser? Nope…. interesting topic of discussion never the less.

WordPress Messes Up Code in Blogs… (fix included)

Colin Stasiuk — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 15:25:25 +0000

OK thanks to the individual who pointed this out to me because I wouldn’t of caught it for a LONG time. So the first problem that I’m having with WordPress is that when I cut and paste code my single quotes become an “open quote” and a “close quote” and if anyone code they know that this is TOTALLY different then a single quote.

There is your solution… if you want to cut and paste code you need to be sure to replace any single quotes in your code with '