My blog is toast

Last night I discovered that my cheap hosting company had accidentally downgraded my hosting package. I suddenly found lots of advertising on my web site. The CGI and FrontPage extensions support were turned off and the MySQL database was gone. This effectively deleted my WordPress blog which has not been backed up since October. They had better restore the MySQL database so I can get my blog back!

I plan to add a page to my web site to serve as an example of a mashup. This will make a nice portfolio page. I can now create a mashup entirely through client-side code with nothing required on the server. I plan to combine my Amazon Wish List, LiveVideo featured videos, Pownce public notes, and Technorati blog search widgets on a single web page. I've found a great community for mashup developers, http://www.programmableweb.com/. I created an account there and plan to visit the site often to use their API directory. They also provide news about web development with a focus on developer APIs and mashups.

Yesterday I made my first contribution to an open source project on CodePlex. I find the JSON Viewer to be very useful in my AJAX work but it requires you to cut and paste the JSON string into its textbox. That gets to be a bit tedious so I downloaded the source code and added a traditional menu system to the program. Now I can browse to my JSON files to load them into the program and use the usual shortcut keys for copy and paste. I sent the project coordinator an email about my improvements but I have not heard back from him. I have another idea for improving the application. It would save me even more time if I could load the JSON data directly from the online source instead of from a file. I don't think that will be too difficult.

I've been struggling to migrate a ASP.NET 1.1 application to ASP.NET 2.0. The Global.asax file is not working and my class files in the App_Code directory cannot be referenced in my ASPX pages. I've been struggling with these problems for days, just going around in circles trying different solutions. I now suspect the problem is a subdirectory that may be configured as a web application instead of the root directory. This would explain some odd behavior. I hope that is the problem because otherwise I'll have to struggle some more.

2 Comments

  • Perhaps it's time you switch over to BlogEngine.NET for your blog engine needs. www.dotnetblogengine.net.

  • I've moved my web site to CrystalTech and restored my WordPress blog but lost a year's worth of posts. My new web site does support ASP.NET 3.5 so I'll be able to develop web applications for my portfolio. I'm sticking with WordPress because it plays well with the blogosphere but I need to automate the MySQL database back ups. Based on the process of copying my last backup (CrystalTech pointed me to an interesting MySQL tool) I should be able to schedule regular back ups.

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