Tag Archives: website

Version 3.3 of my websites: the technical side of things

The PolyBlog
August 17 2016

If you have read any of the earlier blog entries about my site (Version 2.0 of my website…, Version 2.1 of my website…, Version 2.2 (alpha) of my website…, Version 2.3 of my website…), you’ll know that I struggle with some of the features on the sites from time to time. Tweaking this, tweaking that.

Often it is because one feature of the site works REALLY well, and draws me in a certain direction, only to later have that feature either be less important relative to other features, or just stop working well. Sometimes it is an issue with the hosting company.

I didn’t do separate blog entries for version 3.0 where I basically had WordPress all up and running, or version 3.1 where it was a combination of two WordPress sites, one Piwigo subsite for photos and videos, or even version 3.2 where I merged it into 1 WP site and one photo subsite. Things were working pretty well, and I had transitioned over time from Spelunking Web Design (too little bandwidth and storage) to Netfirms (solid for a while until I ran into some config issues with storage) to Greengeeks (which let me host all my pix and integrated well with Google Storage for video). Usually when I have transitioned from one site to another, it has been either my needs outgrowing the basic offerings or the costs associated with my needs being much cheaper elsewhere. Each hoster has slightly different rules and offerings, and as my needs changed, I switched to keep costs down on what are basically personal sites with no commercial value.

This past year though, going back to February, I’ve had a small battle with Greengeeks. Things were going along mostly fine, after I had switched to them last fall (Cutting the cord – Part 5 – Internet hosting). Then, suddenly, things weren’t fine.

The beginning of the end of a relationship

I had consolidated my previous two WordPress sites — polywogg.ca and thepolyblog.ca — into a single site (polywogg.ca and redirected thepolyblog there too), and with the previous focus of what the two sites were about, I was able to more cleanly integrate them. It just made sense at the time for me to have everything together, no need to separate out “personal” from more “professional” musings, and separate menu options to help keep things sorted.

But then I noticed a problem in February with something rather small initially. I was running a “to do” list app on the site…well, actually three of them. One for work, one for personal, one for “other”. Plus a calendar that my wife and I could share. Like with hosting my photos on the site, it seemed to me that if I had a whole site to myself, why would I use other sites, commercial or otherwise, to host my info?

One day I went to do something on the to-do list and the subsite wouldn’t load. Dead. Fatal errors out the wazoo. This was odd, it had been working the week before just fine. Two other lists were also “dead”. And the calendar. WordPress loaded fine, but the look was a bit off. I checked the photo site and it too was acting weird for layout. Connected to the help desk, asked a few questions, and they located the problem almost immediately. They had auto-upgraded my site from PHP 5.6 to PHP 7.0.

If you’re a layperson, you might think, “Sweet! Free upgrade!”. If you’re a little more knowledgeable about sites, you might think, “They upgraded you automatically?”. And if you’re way more hardcore than me, you likely are thinking, “WTF??? Why would they upgrade you automatically? Did they tell you so you could test your config? What kind of hoster would change your site without warning, notice or testing?”. Guess which camp I fell into.

The upgrade broke my todo list installs and the calendar as they weren’t 7.0 compatible. WP’s core is 7.0 compatible, but all the plugins apparently were not. Hard to tell, precisely, but WP was a bit off. PiwigoPress, that I was using for my photos, also didn’t completely like the upgrade tweak in the background, but I’ll come back to that.

They switched me back to 5.6, lists seemed fine, calendar loaded, everything else worked, it seemed like “no harm, no foul”. At first. Then about a week later, I started noticing my photos didn’t seem to load properly. The layout screen for a gallery, for example, would load, but not all the photos. Some were just placeholder symbols in Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer/Edge. Definitely a server issue if all three were treating it the same. But it wasn’t consistent. Sometimes everything would load fine. Home seemed fine, work seemed more intermittent. Then I tried it on my tablet, worked great. Decided it was a temporary bandwidth issue, moved on.

Then I uploaded a batch of new photos, and all hell broke loose on my site. Pics wouldn’t render at all, any format, any location, any connection. It just did NOT want to load right at all. Then some would, others never. I tweaked, I checked, I tweaked, I checked. No idea what was wrong. I hadn’t changed anything in almost two months, but now, suddenly nothing worked? I went back to Greengeeks support to see if anything else had happened? Nope.

The larger investigation begins

I thought it might be the PHP version, as they were going to phase out lower support. So I transitioned all my lists to a new app/site temporarily and then from there more recently to one called TickTick. Accessible from work, comes with app, updates in real-time reliably between Andrea’s phone and mine (we share shopping lists for groceries, for example, so she can make the list and I can buy the stuff), good toggle options to switch things on and off. I moved our calendar to Sunrise, which then was closing shop, and now to Google, since we can both run reliable apps to synch. So I was down to just WP and Piwigo, and they seem to like 7.0 reasonably fine.

Yet wonkiness remained. Over time, I narrowed a feature down that wasn’t working in Piwigo. Photo conversion wasn’t working right. It didn’t seem to be adjusting the size, and the rendering was taking forever.

Apparently, unbeknownst to me, the switching from 5.6 to 7.0, and then back, was not a simple switch. The switchback was actually a complete reset of some sort. Features in PHP setup that had been “on”, like one called GDIMAGE and another like IMAGEMAGICK, were now switched off by default. Now that is not something I would ever play with — once I get the initial setup right, there would be no reason for me to go into that extremely technical side of the configuration. It’s almost like going in and editing the Registry in Windows. You *might* have to do it for something specific, but rarely manually. And I found the default change by accident.

Why would they matter? GDIMAGE and IMAGEMAGICK are library functions for PHP (not quite the right term, but close enough) that add image conversion to the list of things PHP can do. Such as enabling Piwigo — I uploaded photos in one size, and it would convert them to other sizes so you have the thumbnail for small viewing on one type of layout, medium for another, large for a third, and then the full image (if you tell it to keep it, which I did). I had unlimited storage, and having those different sizes is supposed to make everything load better/quicker without having to do resizing on the fly.

But with them off, Piwigo wasn’t working right. It was trying, but I configured and reconfigured things out the wazoo before I found the missing libraries problem. Then I tried to put everything back to the way it had been, but things still weren’t quite right.

I started getting warnings that the server load was too high. Too high? How could that be? I had a WP site that had double-digit visitors on a good day, another that had visitors once or twice a year that I host for someone else, and a photo site that might have visitors once a month. No way could I be overloading the server. Yet the logs didn’t lie. 10K hits in a single day, most asking for pages that didn’t exist, lots of redirects, some attempts to log in. Spam attack in some ways, access attacks in others, and just a lot of pic loading. Sort of. Some of it was just Piwigo still struggling with the load to convert graphics sizes.

Greengeeks and I started a series of exchanges as we tried to nail down the problem. They, like any bad hoster, start with the premise that it’s all the user’s fault and that they didn’t do nuttin. Except they had. The original PHP switcheroo. Then, on a regular basis, they would try to help, and they would tweak a setting they thought would help. Except they would do it without telling me. I would be in the middle of testing multiple configs, resetting things, and suddenly one of my changes looked WRONG. Something that shouldn’t have caused that change. I’d undo it but the change would remain.

And I would go down a rabbit hole for a couple of hours or even days trying to figure out WHY that changed with my changes, only to find out it wasn’t my change. It was them changing background settings in the middle of my testing and not telling me. Meaning I would have to go back to the beginning and start the testing all over.

I was getting increasingly hostile about their support. Particularly after they swore it was PiwigoPress causing the problems. I finally gave access to one of the actual developers to check the config directly, something I was floored he was willing to do. I had been all over the Piwigo forums trying to find a possible cause, and then he offered to check since none of the things I was looking for should have been the problem. Everything was set properly. No issues. And Piwigo is being run on literally hundreds of thousands of installs without issue. The problem was NOT Piwigo.

I finally started to figure out what had happened. This is a bit simplistic and misleading description, but basically it was a combination of several features. WordPress liked PHP 7.0 but a security plugin within WordPress did not. Sort of. It basically changed the way it handled sub-directories — since my WP install was at the equivalent of WWW.SITE.CA, and my Piwigo was in WWW.SITE.CA/PHOTOS, the WP security plugin was trying to control the photos site too. It wasn’t designed to do that, but it wasn’t expecting virtual subdomains to be located below the main root. At least as far as I can tell. Equally, the PHP 5.6 to 7.0 to 5.6 switcheroos turned off my image processors, which sent Piwigo into a tizzy. Between the two, i.e. the image processing and the overly active security plugin, I was really struggling to find the source of the reconfiguration issue.

Adding in multiple changes without Greengeeks telling me they changed something, the problem was impossible. I couldn’t be sure my “testing” was working, and frequently it wasn’t — cuz they changed something in the middle of my efforts.

Ratcheting up to a governance issue

This seems like an odd way to describe it, but I was now dealing with a governance issue. I explicitly told them they could do diagnostics if they were helping, and identify things I might look at, but UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES were they to make any further changes to my actual setup. They did anyway.

So I opened a ticket of complaint. Someone deleted it. Literally, it disappeared out of the tracking system. I opened two new ones — one with the same info and one to find out what happened to my original ticket. Both were deleted.

At this point, the relationship was basically toast, but I’ve paid for three years worth of hosting to get the lowest price, and while I’m willing to eat that cost (decided that upfront when I paid it), I wasn’t willing to go gently into the night. I tweeted a couple of their major customers who provided testimonials on the “greatness” that was Greengeeks, I tweeted their CEO, I tweeted their IT specialist. Suddenly people started paying attention to my tickets.

I didn’t get any better service, but they were at least paying attention. Now, separate from the pain and frustration, many of you might jump to the obvious two solutions:

  1. Kill the account, move on;
  2. Delete everything, reinstall from scratch.

I was hoping for (2) still, but there’s a small problem with that plan. I had no way of knowing that if I got it all working and installed right, another change from GG wouldn’t come along and swamp my setup. So I wanted to know how to mitigate that risk. I started asking a series of Qs of the tech group that I wanted answered sequentially so I could get to the point where I would say, “Okay, if I blow off WordPress, and reinstall, AND I blow off Piwigo and reinstall, how do we do this in the least painful way possible?”.

Backups were fine for WP as I could “reload” the database options i.e. import all the content again. However, Piwigo was now so corrupted in the install that I had no confidence the backups wouldn’t produce the same result — I needed a brand-new fresh install. And reuploading of 7000 photos! With descriptions re-added for albums, etc. Now, I have a good setup for sorting pics at home, it was easy to reupload, and I could have done a DL and new UL of the existing structure, but I figured going nuclear on my install would be easier.

About this time though I realized that I no longer trusted the host. I had transcripts from the same guy, the one I complained about, where it said “A”, then “not A”, then “A”, then “not A”, then “A” and finally “A because you told me it was A”. The guy was a lying sack of excrement. And I still had no accountability response from GG to say how the guy was allowed to delete my complaints in the system, nor were my outstanding issues addressed.

It was time to break up

I started shopping for a new host. I talked to a few, explained some of my problems / frustrations, told them what I needed, and what I was willing to spend. I zeroed in on WebHostingCanada, partly as when I asked some technical questions, they jumped immediately to the problems it took me 3 months to solve on my own. The guy told me up front that one of their cheaper options wouldn’t be enough as the hosting industry didn’t always truly tell the right stats on certain things, essentially telling me that while it says “x”, it’s partly throttled (which isn’t advertised). The exact problem I seemed to be having with GG and which 3 months of testing had revealed but they wouldn’t admit. He even made me laugh at one point…I told him the specs for something technical in my current setup and he said, “Oh, that’s so sad” i.e. that the setup was so limited.

The transition didn’t go completely smoothly, but it did “go”. But that’s the basis for another post.

In terms of Greengeeks, I left my hosting account active for the remaining 2 years — I’m hosting another site through there, bare minimal load, and if their server has problems, it won’t affect me. At the end of the two years, I’ll transition to a site I already have.

While I’m now on my fourth hoster in 18 years, and my third one in 3, I’ve made some other config issues which should help. And I’m still paying less than I was previously, and getting more power. I can (hopefully) live with that.

A noteworthy milestone

The PolyBlog
April 9 2016

This may seem odd to my friends who know that I work in government in the area of planning and even stranger to those who know a good part of that planning is performance measurement. Which means I know a lot about measuring inputs, outputs, outcomes, longer-term outcomes, etc. and the importance of targets, indicators, etc. Chief amongst those pieces for early tracking, more an extension of project management than corporate planning, is the concept of milestones.

Yet when it comes to personal goals, I almost never have milestones. I recognize their benefit, don’t get me wrong. They keep “projects” on track, they make sure you’re moving forward, they give you something smaller to focus on rather than just the big important goal/outcome at the end of the journey. And of course, people literally use them on trips — the various places en route that you’ll pass through or stop at en route to a larger destination.

But milestones are rarely important to me. I can see them, I know what they are, but I rarely document them nor do I “celebrate” when I reach them. I just keep chugging along and mentally note that I have reached them. Part of that is my knowledge that milestones are really false goals, ones that are generally irrelevant to the outcome. They’re a feint to keep people motivated and tracking their progress. Sometimes they are incredibly powerful milestones, like reaching 10,000 steps a day, such that people will often alter their normal behaviour at the end of the day to reach that milestone. Focusing on the day to day, today’s milestone, and its achievement, because “what gets measured is what gets done”.

Except since I already know how milestones work, and the philosophy behind them, the “trick” rarely works for me. It doesn’t motivate me at all.

There’s a second element that goes with that though. I do track things in retrospect. I take stock regularly, as per my last post on my progress. But not with set milestones usually. Put differently, I don’t use quantifiable goal setting which milestones require, but more qualitative check-ins with myself on how I feel I’m doing in my progress. Less rigorous, but the self-reflection is what keeps me on track, not an arbitrary 10%, 20%, 30% milestone.

Finally, there is an element that goes with lots of people who are high achievers, or goal-setters. Once we “achieve” the goal, we rarely stop to take time to mark the achievement. We almost always focus on “what’s next?” and skip past the event. We don’t dwell on our progress, we tick the box and move on.

When I graduated from Carleton, I almost skipped the ceremony. I have very little desire for pomp or circumstance of that sort unless it’s for others, but I took the time to intentionally mark the occasion given the time involved. But I still usually don’t worry about such things.

Which makes it so rare that I set a word count milestone for my blog. I wanted to reach 500K words last year, but when I cancelled my social media campaign, I modified that to take the whole blog to 500K.

And after averaging just over 1000 words a post and adding in entries dating all the way back to the earliest form of my website, plus adding eulogies for my mom and dad, stories about Jacob, and book reviews, I finally neared started to near my goal.

So, with this sentence, I have finally reached the overall goal of 500K.

Finally setting up my book reviews

The PolyBlog
January 12 2016

I have struggled over the past 15 years with multiple incarnations of my book reviews online. These aren’t your typical amateur string of consciousness reviews, I am far too anal for that. I don’t know how many times I’ve read a review by someone else on a site like Amazon and when I was finished the review, I thought, “What the heck does any of that have to do with the book? Was it good?”.

Some of the worst ones say “five stars, just ordered it, haven’t read it yet”. Or “I’m giving it one star because my aunt Bernice said she heard from a friend that their Minister was told by a parishioner that it has a bad word in it somewhere”. While reviews of those types are easy to dismiss, I am equally troubled by the people who do plot summaries with no review, say only what they like and yet give it 1 or 2 stars, say only what they hate and yet give it 4 or 5 stars, and a host of other equally useless content like “good book”.

And I confess that I have a small dream. Not huge, because I don’t have the time for huge, but small. It is to have people send me their books as advance reader copies (ARCs) because they have read my reviews somewhere else and now want me to review THEM. This isn’t that far-fetched, it has happened multiple times already. I particularly like it when someone reads my review and comments on it. It’s like creating my own time-shifting book club for introverts.

The problem, of course, is if I want to build any sort of brand, I have to actually figure out what that brand is going to be. And I think I’m close. Certainly closer to final than I have ever been before. I have a layout — a link to the book’s cover on Amazon, brief summary of plot or premise, what I liked, what I didn’t like, an overall one-line/tweet review, some boilerplate info on the book’s publication, my rating of course, and some verbiage to address the mandatory US disclosure requirements i.e. if I received the book in exchange for a review or am friends with the author (yep, I’m in Canada, but I think the disclosure is not a bad idea and wouldn’t be surprised if other countries adopt it too, plus as you’ll see below, some of my reviews get posted on US sites, so easier to include it upfront rather than go back and add it later).

Posting it on my own site has always been relatively easy. Figuring out how to create an index, however, which allows people to see the list of reviews by author, title, rating, year, or review order is not as easily accomplished on a simple WordPress site, particularly if I don’t want a lot of back-end programming and data entry nor front-end delays in rendering. The simplest option on both ends is to maintain the various lists as separate static pages that I just update from time to time. I found some nice buttons I like, easily added them, with some bright colour coding, and it’s good to go (Book Review Index). I even managed to include my full approach to book reviews so if anyone wants to know if they want to risk me reading their book and doing a review, they can easily see what I do.

The “building my brand” idea though has frequently overwhelmed my approach as there are lots of places to post reviews, and most of them require the same info for posting, but they all have the info in a slightly different order. I was playing with Microsoft Access to create a simple database for entry and saving of the data, with the idea that I would then generate multiple reports in the format/order that the various review sites needed, but Access was not playing nicely. Part of the problem is that what I’m doing is not really that complicated, and while Access will produce reports out the wazoo, what I really needed was it to produce a single page at a time for the latest single record, and preferably without doing look-up queries to do it. Particularly as there are multiple sites to generate reports for, and I didn’t want to create multiple reports with multiple queries all competing for my attention. I’m sure it can be done. I’m sure it can be made quite simple. But not by me without learning way more about Access than I ever want to learn. There’s something strangely ironic and equally disturbing that I could probably do it in dBase IV or COBOL more easily than I was finding my attempts in Access.

So I switched to Excel. Really, honestly, it’s a flat-file database, and there is no relational element in my usage. Exactly what Excel was originally designed for, albeit I’m using text rather than financial numbers.

My new layout is working AWESOME for me. I have:

  • a primary page which is my master index…it’s not what I work with most of the time, but it does have the complete list — if I lose everything else, this is the master page;
  • Sheet 2 is my simple data entry page — 22 fields, although technically 9 of those get combined into a big tag field later, it’s just easier to group the tags separately when I’m writing the review;
  • Sheet 3 is a temporary paste/staging page — this is a lesson I learned a long time ago to paste into a page that everything else pulls from, rather than pulling from the master or the data entry page…that way if something messes up on the other two pages, or I change some setting or layout, the whole set of subsequent pages are not messed up;
  • Sheets 4-14 are what would have been separate reports in Access but just are “links” to different sections of the staging page and are in the exact order I need to paste my reviews into:
    • my PolyWogg pages;
    • Amazon.ca
    • Amazon.com (they don’t link and push to .ca anymore)
    • Chapters-Indigo
    • Kobo books (a different set of reviews for paper and digital, unlike Amazon)
    • Barnes and Noble
    • Nook books (as with Kobo, a different set of reviews for paper and digital)
    • Google Play Books
    • Good Reads
    • Shelfari
    • Library Thing

I’ve already automated a bunch of stuff on the browser front too so that I can open all those sites with one click, find the book, and start uploading the review. Some of them are already on Amazon, I uploaded them previously, but most of the other sites are new and relatively virgin territory (I’ve only uploaded reviews of four titles so far, and many of them had no previous reviews or ratings). It has taken a bit longer than I would like to upload the first few, but I’m getting a bit faster now that I’m used to the page interfaces.

Once that is done, I copy the final text from data entry over to the master list, and that first page has some calculated fields on it that also generates and formats my index entries for the website and the basic outline for my tweet update that the review is posted on my own site.

Automation should help streamline the review process somewhat, and I had to figure out my business process to get to this stage. Now that it’s done, and I’ve tested the model on the first four reviews, I’m excited to upload a backlog of another 30 old ones and get started on my goal of 50 new ones for the year.

Cutting the cord – Part 5 – Internet hosting

The PolyBlog
October 26 2015

When people cut the cord, most just look at TV, internet and home phone. Some add in cellular. For me, there was a fifth area — internet hosting of my websites. Yes, you read that correctly. Plural.

After a redesign about two years ago, I had PolyWogg.ca set up as my “personal” site. ThePolyBlog.ca was my more “professional” site, writing and musings about more formal topics. I also host AstroPontiac.ca for a board I sit on. And within polywogg.ca, I also had sub-sites for photos, calendars, to do lists, etc. Most of the sites were fully integrated with my photo site cross-linked to my personal and professional sites so that I can post my media there without duplicating it in WordPress. I’ve messed around with my site design going back to 1998, seventeen years of tweaking etc. The latest tweak was creating a new subsite for astrophotography blogging and pics.

I have had various hosts over the years. One big one I had was a small company in the Prairies that a friend was using. Small, decent support for tweaks, not a lot of bells and whistles but definitely personal support. I mentioned in an earlier post that I considered running my own server, partly because of the cheap hosting costs and partly to have my own private cloud available to me easily. In the end, I decided not to run my own server, but I was ambitious with my web design and the small company wasn’t going to meet my long-term storage needs. I went big.

Mostly the company here in Ottawa worked well for me for a long time. I was paying for a business account to give me more email addresses, more storage, etc. and a LOT of room to grow, but mostly to get the higher level of support if and when something went wrong. When they were bought by Netfirms in the U.S., and everything was merged, there were definite growing pains. It took a lot of work and some complete redesign in the end to get me where I wanted to be, with multiple subsites running and everything separate by function. It worked, but the overhead to keep it all up to date was killing me. Too many updates, plugins, etc. The separated design helped immensely though to figure out what one set of subdesigns would look like, and then the other. In the end, they were similar but just slightly different enough that previous single-site solutions had been confused. Then disaster struck. Kind of.

Netfirms had a DNS attack, and it took down a bunch of their servers. My site has some plugins that monitor the site being “up” or “down” through regular monitoring from the plugin’s websites, and my inbox filled up with notifications. Site A is down. Site B is down. Site C is down. Site D is down. Site A is up again. Site B is up again. Site A is down again, etc. 36 hours of notifications of sites being up and down. Then I got the message from Netfirms that was the all-clear signal. Everything had been resolved, all was working. Except my sites weren’t back up yet. They were still down. I contacted support who assured me everything was fixed; I assured them it wasn’t since I couldn’t log in to my site. They refused to help, basically arguing with me that the problem was fixed. When I finally convinced them, no, it was still not fixed, they said, “Oh, yeah, they’re still working on it.” Really? That’s what I’m getting for business level support? $180 a year to host all my sites, minimal load on their servers, and outright lies.  “It’s fixed” and then “they’re working on it” when the first lie didn’t take. I escalated to Tier 2 and got the same run around. I waited a day, still not fixed, tried again, same run around. First they told me it was completely fixed, and then when I showed them my site was down, they said the technicians were still working on it. Really? Again with two completely opposite stories? Sorry, I called it quits right then and there. I needed a new webhost, and why not look for one a bit cheaper while I was at it.

There are lists out there of the top five webhosts and some of the deals are awesome. But I liked the personal side of the first host, not thrilled about being the little number in the big cog again. I canvassed some friends, and one of them suggested GreenGeeks.com. I fell in love with them just from the name. Ignore the fact that I called them GreenGreeks about a dozen times when I was accessing their site, I checked the specs and price. I basically need unlimited subdomains and full domain hosting. Not really, probably 10 would suffice, but more than most small companies offering 1-2. This often runs into a problem not with the subdomains but with the number of databases it will let you create — some stop at 5-8, and if you count 1 for PolyWogg, 1 for ThePolyBlog, 1 for astropontiac, 1 for a calendar, 3 for separate to do lists, 1 for a photo site, 1 for a cloud/file manager, etc., I’m at 9 and I’m not even maxing out my plans yet. I can get by without a lot of upload/download bandwidth for the sites (I don’t get a lot of traffic), but I like having lots of storage space to have an easy-to-access personal cloud. Mail servers are a must, but almost everyone has those. A few other bells and whistles, and I’d be good to go. What did I get?

GreenGeeks gives me unlimited storage. Sweet. Unlimited bandwidth. Double sweet. Three different choices for email server. I’m in love. Simple user interface for the control panel, personalized support that is decent, subdomains, addon domains, DNS management and registration (which I don’t need, but nice to know it’s there), some SEO and marketing tools (not as extensive as Netfirms, but decent), access to my logs (what? really? would have had to ask at some other sites), and perhaps most important, the Softaculous Apps Installer as their default install program (not the only way to do it, just the default). I’ve installed another app that does ToDo lists well, had to do it manually as not available in Softaculous, and it was a relative breeze. The help files could be a little more up to date, but I got it to work first time, just a little tweaking of the instructions.

So Netfirms was charging me $180 for the year. GreenGeeks? Also $180. For three years. $5 a month instead of $15. For better support, more options, and a personalized experience. Tailored more to my needs. An easy trigger to pull.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Moving my old site over has been a pain in the patootie. WordPress went relatively easily, but I ended up with a config issue the first time and even though they fixed it, I wasn’t 100% confident it would stay “patched” and not self-destruct later on. Kind of a background hack that solved the immediate problem, but I wasn’t sure it didn’t have others lurking in the shadows. So I blew everything off and reinstalled manually from scratch. Then imported as much as I could of the existing base.

There is one thing missing from GreenGeeks but it was missing from Netfirms too. None of the sites will let you stream video directly. They make you upload and store it at Youtube or its clones. Video just kills them and like most hosts, they just don’t support it without a lot more cash outlay. My videos are only personal videos and I was crossposting with DailyMotion. But the wife wasn’t happy with the ads that went with DailyMotion, so I’ve moved the video files over to Google Drive. Which necessitated re-adding the links to the photo site, but that wasn’t about cutting the cord, or the new host, just something that happened coincidentally at the same time as I made the other change. I only mention it as it is a factor for a lot of people when they make a change — the cost and structure change, but how complicated do you make it to take advantage of the window of opportunity to implement other changes at the same time? As an aside, I had to threaten Netfirms with legal action to get a partial refund of the remaining year’s worth of prepaid service (I basically asked for a refund because they had not provided the contracted service). It’s only $30 back, but better than nothing.

Overall, I love the new host. At a third of the price and better service, what’s not to love?

Cutting the cord – Part 3 – Home phone

The PolyBlog
October 25 2015

As I mentioned in Part 1 (Cutting the cord – Part 1 – Internet), there are five main areas for people looking to “cut the cord”: internet, TV, home phone, cellular phone and website hosting. Of all of them, the one that people are the most bothered by but least likely to do anything about is the home phone.

I grew up with Bell. And I was a long-time victim, err, customer of Bellopoly. I had some perverse pleasure when my wife (then girlfriend) and I moved in together as it meant only paying Bell once between us. One of those cost savings that you actually are gleeful about, in a strange way.

When the CRTC forced Bell to deregulate some of their offerings, other companies popped up to offer home phone service but the prices weren’t that much better and it wasn’t a strong incentive to switch. People relied on their home phone, an essential service you needed to work, and not something you messed with…you paid Bell their monthly extortion, and you grumbled, but you didn’t do anything about it.

Then cell service exploded. Lots and lots of people have ditched their landlines completely, only having cell phones. Mainly the under-30 age bracket, but not exclusively. Just as payphones have followed the dodo out the door, landlines are no longer “must-have” essential services for everyone. Lots of households have multiple cell phones, and with the explosion of smartphones, most of them have them with them everywhere they go. Less chance of leaving your old-style flip phone in the console of your car, or not having it close by.

So when people have “cut the cord”, they have been more likely of late to just cut the landline entirely and go all cellular, all the time. I don’t know that it is a viable solution for us. I am not a huge cell user, honestly. If I have or make 10 calls a month, it’s high. For my wife and I it is mainly about convenience when one of us is out (me) and the other (wife) wants something to be picked up. Or I call from the grocery store and say, “Hey, you put x on the list, did you want 500 ml or a litre?”. Or more often, “You put x on the list…what the **** is x and / or where in the store would I find it?”. I also have a mental blank when I think, “So, whose cell would we put as the number for dealing with our internet, probably me?”. Silly, as it makes no difference whatsoever, but I have some mild comfort from the fact there is a “common” line to reach either Andrea or I, even if we’re not there to answer directly. Also, I like the fact that if my cell phone rings when I’m at work, it’s guaranteed to be worth answering — so few people have it, if it rings, it’s likely my wife or my son’s school. If I start listing it for every business we deal with, I’ll get spam I really don’t want.

As a result, I’ve never really considered cancelling my home phone. I just left it with Bell for a long time, and then when Rogers took over all my other offerings a few years back during a move, I switched to Rogers Home Phone too. Didn’t hurt that I wasn’t sure if the phone lines in our new house were that reliable. They sure looked like cheap wiring. And I never had a problem with the Rogers setup. We have a wireless phone in the house that the base plugs into a jack, and the rest of the extensions connect to the base wirelessly. You only need one jack to work. Because I had Rogers internet, it meant I needed a separate wire setup so that the connection came out of the cable jack, split into phone and computer/internet and then there was the modem, router, computer daisy chain while the other line went back into the wall and wired the phone. All of it worked, no issues.

Well, one issue. The same as with Bell. We don’t use our home phone a lot, and it was running us between $30 and $50 per month over the last few years. I’d tweak the setup once in awhile to get the cost down, but it really was a drag on spending. My mom passed away 3 years ago, and I only call one sibling long distance…very rarely do I make phone calls, most of my comms with people are either in person or by email, facebook or occasional text. My wife uses the phone to talk to the parental units and her sister in town, plus a few other business related things, but her cell would likely work as well. Still we wanted the “common number”. We considered a complete ditch, but weren’t quite ready to pull the trigger.

Enter the VOIP…voice-over-internet-protocol. It’s the fancy way of saying that instead of Rogers Cable or Bell Telephone providing your phone service, you run the connection through the internet. Some think it is just like Skype, but not quite. First, it’s just a phone, no video connector. Second, Skype just runs on your smartphone or tablet or computer, whereas VOIP uses an actual phone for the hardware (usually). Third, there’s a company on the other end, just like Rogers and Bell, handling the connection for you. Not exactly like an “operator”, but close enough. What’s the attraction? You can keep your home phone number, you can use your existing phones, you buy a base unit that plugs into your router, and…drum roll please…it costs $3.95 a month. A tenth the cost of the landline and we still get most of the benefits of an actual landline through the virtual one.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are reasons why you might not want to do it. First and foremost, it uses the internet. If you have a lousy internet connection, this might not be great for you. Second, there can be slight lags in your conversation. It’s not as crystal clear as your regular Bell line, and sometimes there can be a half-second delay when you’re chatting. I have a friend who was using it, liked it, didn’t find the lag egregious, so we gave it a try. My wife thinks it’s fine, barely notices it. Third, there is the “emergency” situation. Most of the stubborn people say, “Oh, I need a landline in case there’s an emergency.” And if you have VOIP and your power or even just your internet is out, you have no phone. Cue the backup cell phones that we already have, so not much of a concern. As well, if you have to phone 911, the computer won’t know automatically where you live, so you’ll have to give the operator the address. Just as if you were calling from a cell phone.

In the end, we went with Ooma. I’d like to say I checked out 5-10 great providers and this was the best, but really I went with it because a friend had it and liked it, with her husband being a decent geek who did a bunch of that type of research before me. The base unit ran me $125 or so at Best Buy. Setup was relatively easy. You plug it into your router, it connects to the internet, downloads all the latest firmware, and you walk through account setup on the computer. 20 minutes later or so, you’re good to go with a temporary Ooma number. You can keep that number if you want, or put in a request to port your old home phone number over. You can even run them simultaneously if you want to try it and see if you’re okay with it before ditching your other landline.

You might be thinking, “Sure, how much is long-distance though?”. How about free anywhere in Canada? There is a glitch with other long-distance — whereas Bell didn’t care how much you ran up the first time, they just billed you after the fact, Ooma is pay as you go. So if you want to phone elsewhere, you have to put money on your account. Mind you at less than a penny per minute to call the U.S., it’s not like you have to put a lot of cash on the account, but you do have to put a little. Just like buying a phone card for long-distance, entirely through your online account too.

We’ve had no issues so far, porting was super easy. They offer you a whole bunch of extra features in the first month to get you to upgrade to Ooma Premiere ($14.95 a month) and the features are sweet. Better voicemail. Forwarding to your cell phone easily and with some extra conditions. Copies of your voicemails sent to you by email. Notifications by text or email that someone has left you a message at home. Even the option to have the phone listed in any area code in the country (i.e. if you want it to look like a B.C. number, you can have it be a B.C. number even if you’re living in Chicoutimi!). Great options, and only an extra $11 a month. Still well under the $40 I was paying before, on average. Yet we didn’t need most of them. We have voicemail, we can access it remotely, that’s good enough.

$4 a month instead of $40. Instead of $500 this year, it will cost $175 with the hardware. After this year, it will drop to $50 a year, pretty much what I was paying monthly under the old system with taxes. Oh, and that $3.95 a month? That includes your 911 emergency access fee, so it isn’t even Ooma charging you the full $4.

Likely we’ll think of ditching the landline altogether, but for now, I’m willing to live with the cost/benefit ratio. And I’m okay with saving $325 this year alone, even accounting for the new hardware cost.