What's New

A major overhaul of the site's inner-workings was done (not much visible change.) This was done because some of the security measures were obsolete, and the old captcha challenge I had been using was no longer working, which prevented users from signing the Guestbook. That was replaced with Google's ReCaptcha. Also, some of the various contact forms were consilidated into a single page that handles all such requests

I've again changed my hosting service, this time to HawkHost. Arvixe had been taken over by EIG, which is a company with a reputation for gobbling-up small hosting services, and turning them to crap. You can read more about that on WebHosting Talk

The first major update to the Web site in quite a while, I've updated the pages to use frames, so that the navigation menu isn't lost when scrolling the pages.

My experience with Microsoft technical support was so unique that it inspired me to launch a new Web site

I've rewritten my Guestbook to run off a MySQL database. All of the existing entries were moved to the database. The primary reason I did this was to combat the bastard spammers who try to fill-up my Guestbook with their tripe. It used to be easier, as I could identify the IP Address of the offending spammer, then block that from my site. Unfortuantely, as spammers become more sophisticated, they have started to use zombie computers -- the systems of unsuspecting (and usually clueless) user who have been infected by a virus that allows their connection to be used by the spammers to do their diry business. I will also have new entries held until I have approved them, so the spammers can post all they want, but their entries will never appear in the Guestbook. I am working on setting-up some more sophisticated filtering, and once that's in place, I will switch back to immediate updates.

Since my 'Though for today' file was beginning to contain a large number of amusing definitions, I decided to separate them into a 'Word of the Day' feature.

I've had to yet again switch providers. Your-site.com seemed to always be having one or another major problem, though I always stuck with them because they seemed to really work hard to correct them. But the last straw came today, when I found out my email had been getting bounced for over 24 hours. There was no notification, and nothing posted in their system status. So I called up tech support, and was told in an off-hand manner that they'd tried to implement spam filters, and everything was bouncing. When I asked for more details, the tech seemed quite annoyed.
So that was it. I can't tolerate not having email, especially when it didn't seem like any big deal to them. And as far as their new spam filters, I already have a filtering service-- I never wanted them to implement them, and when they caused problems, they should have immediately backed the change out, instead of playing with them for days while everyone's email bounced.

For the second time in three months, my provider (DannyBoy) experienced a failure which resulted in the loss of my entire Web site. I was also without email for some time, and lost all messages sent during a 10 hour window. Because of these problems, along with the almost nonexistent status they gave me, I decided to find a new provider.
So I located one that's faster and gives me more, and is about 1/3 the cost. So we'll see how it goes.

My Web service provider experienced a catastrophic failure, in which my entire site was lost. I had my own backup from January, so I was able to recover from that. Any changes and updates I had done were of course lost.

Overhauled comic strip page to include archive sites for many of the strips, and more links to other sites.

Removed LinkExchange banners. They didn't seem to be generating much traffic, and were sometimes caused the pages to load slowly.

Moved Web site from Eclipse to DannyBoy for hosting. This was done due to technical problems at Eclipse, which it seemed they were unable to resolve in a reasonable time, as well as getting more services for less money.
Removed the old homepage.

Due to a change the Houston Chronicle made in the way their comics are accessed, I can no longer display the images on my own page. Therefore I don't have any control over the comic page itself. The major differences are:
- The comics are not all displayed on a single page.
- There's no direct link from a medium- to high-resolution comic.
- The ads on the page are not mine.
- There is no link back to my page, so I open the comics in a new window.

Widened the page layout. Previously my page was set up so that it would fit on a 640x480 resolution screen. However, I've gotten complaints that the layout looked too narrow. Since most users have a minimum screen size of 800x600, I went with a layout that works with that size.

My Homepage was given a whole new look! The main page was broken-up into several smaller ones, the color scheme was redone, and a navigation bar was added to the left side of the page. The main reason for the overhaul was that things were becoming too cluttered, and the time to load the page was getting too long due to all the graphics on the same page.

My For Sale page went up. This is something I'd been working on for a while. There are still more items that could be added, but I thought it would be better to go with what I had so far.
I joined The Link Exchange. The primary reason was to get more exposure to my For Sale page, though it should help the overall traffic too.

I became Master of my Domain - I registered GeoDosch.com as my Domain name, so that I would have a permanent Email and URL address.

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