Scott.Buffington.me

I suppose this is my "Hello World" post for my new domain, but I also have some real reasons for the post as well. First, if you are unfortunate enough to have to use Internet Explorer, I apologize for some of the formatting (CSS) issues. As time permits I will work through the issues and hopefully have everything legible. I will also be moving over my blogroll and such as soon as I tackle the last of the CSS issues. I also wanted to test that the old feedburner feed works with this blog and also needed to overwrite the actual xml file, as it did not reflect the actual posts on this domain.

On a personal note I have some relatively big news coming up that I probably should have mentioned before now. Once I know that my Internet Exploring visitors can read it I will make it official. Thanks for moving with me to my hopefully permanent home on the Internet.

For nine years the last Friday in July has marked System Administrator Appreciation Day. Today is the day to thank the person, who keeps your email flowing, your favorite web site available or in some cases your fantasy football league available. If a service you use is kept afloat by a computer, a system administrator is behind it. SysAdmin Day is also special to me because for the past ten plus years System Administration has been my chosen profession, for both my day and night jobs. While gifts are always accepted, coffee, donuts or a thank you is cool too.

Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day!

For those of you that visited Nitevilla or Brutal Deluxe over the past few weeks, you might have noticed the websites were unavailable at times. After cutting tickets with my web hosting company for nine days in a row I made the decision to finally move the existing two domains I had hosted externally to my home. Alex volunteered some of his hosting space for Brutal Deluxe because we host our podcasts from that url and there was concern that my ISP may cut back on speed when you have 250 plus people downloading a 25MB file every week. Thank you Alex for taking the baton for our league website. Nitevilla however is now happily running from my home and has seen some changes as well.

The biggest change for Nitevilla is the unveiling of the new Brutal Deluxe Forum , Vanilla, a lighter and faster forum software was chosen. I have been unhappy with SMF for my personal forum for quite some time. For a large forum I think SMF rates right up there, but it was more than I needed for a personal web site and I felt my new choice did a better job of promoting discussion. Rather than users or even random visitors having to dig down into boards, they are immediately brought right into the current discussions. Vanilla, like my Buff CMS is much lighter and faster than many of the more popular choices.

I will keep the old Nitevilla Forums, circa. 2001-2007(I told a lie, I do have the forums on a backup but continuing to host them online meant patching the forum) as an archive permanently at the original url, but I have disabled registration. One of my pet peeves with SMF is that other forum software developers had difficulty writing conversion scripts. Many that did successfully convert SMF still had issues with users signing in after the conversion. I tried making my Buff CMS tie into SMF so that BDFL team owners could sign in to post news on Brutal Deluxe several years ago. I ran into nothing but problems trying to hash the password for SMF and soon gave up. Others have had similar issues and hence the lack of conversion scripts. I decided it might just be time for a new start. As a result you will have to register again to post on the Nitevilla Forum. This is something I hate asking people to do, and my hope is that it is the last time ever. More Open Source software need to adopt OpenID or come up with very GOOD documentation on how to tie into the user databases. I hope all that had and used the forum would again register but I certainly understand if it is not a priority. This post is more of a heads up to those tht visit that things have changed.

Back to my web hosting issues. While I feel HostRocket has lost their way in providing good web hosting, I do have to commend them for refunding the ENTIRE amount that I had paid through December 2008. They did not argue with me at all and I was not going to argue with them. I was polite when I cancelled my account and explained the scenario to them. They did not dispute anything I said and although by their terms they only had to refund 70%, HostRocket refunded 100% of what they owed me for the next years worth of hosting. That was an extremely classy thing to do, especially without making me jump through hoops to make it happen. I think HostRocket has turned their sights and their technical staff toward a Voice over Internet Protocal business and as a result are allowing their hosting to die a slow death. That is unfortunate, I terminated a six year relationship with them and up until my recent problems considered them to be a very good web host.

Sean Smyth stopped by the website this morning to recruit myself and other locals for a story in the Carlisle Sentinel on fantasy football. I am going to call Sean tomorrow morning and answer some of his fantasy football questions and pimp the Brutal Deluxe Football League and a few of our crazy team names and some of my teams in the other leagues. Like the PA Fighting Pike, who at this time are winning big.

Any other local fantasy football folks who take part in my league over at Brutal Deluxe or the other leagues I take part in, check Sean's post out for contact info, he needs to hear from you by Wednesday.

Last month I made a reference to Order 66. In the comments Ray "aka Streeter" mentioned that "I Survived Order 66" would make a cool t-shirt. I thought it would also, and now you can get yours in the store. There are six variations to choose from and all are being offered with no markup, whatever Cafepress charges is what you pay. Let's be honest, this was not exactly difficult to do.

Kind of geeky, but I think it is kind of funny too. Get them while they are hot!

Update - I threw a little something on the back of the shirts. The value t-shirt only allows a front image. So if you would rather not pimp Nitevilla, that is the shirt for you.

Ross and his girlfriend organized and pulled off rather nicely a local blogger meetup. I had never met Ross, only traded words via the web prior to last night. I of course watched football and met Alex on Sunday. A meetup we had talked about a few months ago and planned a few weeks back. But otherwise I have never met any of the local folks who have websites. In addition to Ross and Alex I also met Mike and his wife who are expecting their first child in May and Jonathan. Hopefully the conversation was not too geeky for the significant others.

Several folks were taking pictures, watching election results come in while snacking and drinking a few beers. Alex actually recorded interviews with each of us for a Podcast he plans to release later this week. I encourage all of you to check it out if you are at all curious about any of the various projects and websites we all maintain.

Updated: August 2008

My first solo owned domain name was nitevilla.net and it was where this post was initially published. I chose Nitevilla because I would prefix all my online gaming avatars with "Nite". The practice caught on with a few online friends and we sort of had a gaming group for a while. Initially the nitevilla website was intended to be the online home for those folks and myself. Nitevilla became my personal blog for about 7 years. Prior to nitevilla, I had co-owned and been a part of nitegallery.net (No one I know owns this website any longer) and I had various free websites from Geocities and Yahoo. I have no idea when I had my first free website, probably around the 1995 timeframe. By the year 2000 I had gotten serious about learning web technologies and by May of 2001 I was blogging on nitevilla.net.

In August of 2008 I moved my blog to scott.buffington.me, choosing a more personal domain name and one that fit me other than a group of folks.