The comprehensive lack of apparent activity here for four days is not because my technical problems are persisting: it’s because they have gone away.  “Gone away” does not mean “fixed” though it just means ‘gone away’ as in ‘popped out to the shops but might be back soon’.

The sequence of events was basically:

• Site was hogging far too many resources on a shared server
• Site was shut down so I could fix it
• All software was re-installed and updated and a few optimisation tweaks done
• Site came back and hogged the resources again
• Site shut down again
• Site came back, without any changes, and under supervisions and everything was fine

I don’t like that.  I don’t like things that just start working without a proper cause of failure being identified and rectified.  There is no guarantee that it won’t all fall over again.

As it was apparently working OK, I started making a few modifications. The latest version of WordPress has some new features I didn’t have before so I made some changes to take advantage of them.  I also ditched the old theme because one of the features I wanted to use was widgets and the old theme didn’t support them.  I was getting bored with it anyway, and a bit annoyed that the main area was slightly too narrow for YouTube clips.

All this led me into an anal retentive cycle of housekeeping and getting side-tracked.  For a start I made a modification to the theme to replace the built-in banner photos and to make them come up on a random basis.  So I ended up spending hours making 970×140 header images from some of my photos and ended up with loads and loads of them.

Then I spent some time getting what I wanted into the sidebars, finding some plugins to give me drop-down lists of links instead of having a huge list of them visible all the time, and the same for categories.

Finally I made the mistake of deciding to use the new tagging feature.  I thought this might involve manually editing every single post to put tags in, but found that there is a facility to convert categories to tags.  That relief was short-lived when I discovered that I ended up with a number of posts havnig no category at all. Not even ‘uncategorised’.

This is not really a problem unless you are fussy about details. Unfortunately I am, so I have been working my way through old posts putting them into one of the few categories I have left.  Unnecessary but interesting.  It gave me a chance to correct a few typos in old posts but also to remember all sorts of little details of life from 3 years ago.

I have forced myself to put that on hold for today, but when I have finished I am going to see how everything is running before deciding what to do for the long term.   I am convinced that all the resource-hogging was the result of spamming activity and also convinced that if such activity comes along again the site will be taken down.

At that point I may have to reluctantly wave goodbye to the hosts.  I don’t think they will be able to help, and at the ridiculously low prices they charge they probably shouldn’t have to spend the sort of time it would take to solve my spam problem.  In that case I will probably take up the kind offer of hosting elsewhere.

If that happens I would move the .co.uk  domain over but I reckon I would keep the .org with ANHosting and use it for something else, like experimenting with another system.

Right now I am keeping fingers crossed that it all stays together long enough for me to finish tidying up the data so I can let everything run in a stable configuration for a while.

The end result of all this is that I have been spending a lot of time working on this site with no obvious effect.   Its a bit like having a car and spending all the time working on it in the garage but never driving it.  Time to get back into the driving seat for a bit!