If you have no idea what’s wrong with SOPA, just Google it.
GoDaddy, a pretty well known domain registrar, not only supports SOPA but helped write it. While in recent days they’d stepped back, it got me thinking. I left GoDaddy years ago, when one of my domains was almost up for renewal. I switched it to NetworkSolutions, which was where my other two domains were.
History. When I first purchased ipstenu.org (08-Sep-1999 00:09:50 UTC) we got domains by filling out a web form, getting an email with a PDF, printing it up, singing it, photocopying our drivers license and faxing that back in. Then, if you didn’t actually have a drivers license, you got a phone call and a fun chat with a woman about what was going on, yes, the state ID was fine, the domain will be set up in five days. A year later I bought another domain, and since I had an account with NetSol, it was as simple as ‘I want that one,’ and I was done.
When I got my third domain, I used GoDaddy since it was cheap, easy and fast. Click, click done. In 2008 or so, all the news about GoDaddy’s rampant sexism and general asshattery ended up with me transferring off GoDaddy and onto NetworkSolutions. Except I didn’t. I had a friend do it, since he and I were trading favors. So up until December 27th, 2011, I’d never actually transferred a domain name!
It’s still weird, and reminds me of the fax days, but it’s pretty easy.
It’s not that I was having any issues with NetworkSolutions. But their statement on SOPA, while anti-SOPA, still sat in my craw a little. Basically they were chickening out, and while I was pretty sure my domains were fine (and my relationship with NetSol), it was one of those days when I felt like I needed to make a change.
Namecheap has been on my radar for years. I’ve had an account with them, and no domains, for most of 2011, since the last time GoDaddy got stupid. See, I raise a lot of money for charity, and one of the things I raise money for is elephants. I want them out of zoos and I want them out of circuses. So when I saw GoDaddy’s founder hunted elephants, I had no choice. I couldn’t be a hypocrite and I had to turn my back on GoDaddy. When I decided I should move from NetSol to someone a little friendlier, whom I felt I trusted as people (that’s a huge deciding factor for me) and who had a good rep, I decided to turn to the people taking ruthless advantage of GoDaddy.
Like Namecheap.
See, they hate SOPA. A lot. Enough that between the $20 credit I had from them (for playing Internet games) and the $7 SOPASucks discount they were offering, it would cost me a grand total of $1.01 to move my domains over. The only time I’d ever worry about moving my domain names is if my DNS (i.e. the nameservers) were run by them. They’re not, they’re run by me, which means a transfer like this is all paperwork. No downtime, nothing to fuss about except the waiting.
All the politics aside, if you have no problems with where you registered your domain, and can do everything you want, then there’s no reason to move. I mean that sincerely. I feel that way about webhosts, and all things computer related. If there’s no compelling case for you to move, stay. If there is, though, moving your domain registrar is actually a lot less scary than moving hosts!
There are a few rules about moving domains. Like you can’t make a bunch of edits to your registry info and then move (it looks ‘suspicious’), and there are date ‘blocks’ on certain things that make you wait 45 days. But assuming, like me, you’ve had the same registrar since the dawn of dinosaurs…
Step 1) Turn off domain protection from your existing host.
Makes sense, you’re now setting it up for people to ask if they can have your domain. In the case of NetworkSolutions, you have to check a box to get an EPP Key (Authorization Key). Save that Key, you’ll need it in a minute.
Step 2) Turn off any WHOIS protection you have.
If the transfer company can’t see who you are, they can’t add you.
Step 3) Go and request the domains be transferred over at your new registrar.
Dead simple. You add the domains, the new guys send an email. You read the email, visit the webpage and click “Yes, please. I want you to be my boss.” This is ‘Fax Number 1’ in the old day.
Then you get another email, this time it’s the old domain register. “Oh noez! Why you leave me?” they wail. Or rather ‘Are you sure?’ Click yes again. This is Fax Number 2.
Step 4) Wait up to 5 days.
And write a blog post.
My move isn’t done yet, but it’s ‘in transfer.’ While I understand why we have the back and forth’s of the emails (faxes) to make sure I’m really me and I really requested this (remember, I work at a bank in my day job), it’s still odd that after the approval is done, it’s a 5-day wait.
But there you are. That’s how (and why) you should switch your registrar.
I run my server with PHP DSO.(For the differences between DSO and SuPHP, read 
So why is 777 dangerous? 777 means ‘everyone has full access to this file.’ Yeah, that sounds dangerous! I don’t want that! The only person who should have full access is you! But DSO doesn’t like to upload files without 777 permissions. In part, this is WordPress’s fault, but really it’s an unholy combination of things. 
The last step I had was chowning the folder for uploads and 2011 to 
Then a month or so later, the CMS releases an upgrade. Your client clicks the upgrade button (because most CMS tools have made that easy) and it installed, but now the site is broken. They contact you, complaining, and you end up spending hours of your time trying to calm them down, complaining to the CMS folks, and being grumpy.
We can’t predict the future with any long-term accuracy, but we can prepare for it. If you choose to use a product, you need to know where it’s going. The day to find out about new features is not the release day, nor is it even the pre-release candidates or the betas! You need to be proactive, and keep in touch with the project, where it’s going, and how that impacts you. Every open source product allows for ‘nightly’ builds. These are the things you generally don’t want to run on production versions of websites, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t run them on your site. Install the nightly release on a server, set it up so it auto-upgrades every night (or if you use subversion, set up a pull every day or every x hours). Include some sample data, include all the plugins you use on your client sites, and test it at least every week.
For a product like Drupal, which doesn’t have a full-version upgrade as a one-click option, I usually tell people “Hire someone. It’s a pain.” Beyond that, however, you need to make sure they understand what new versions entail. A lot of people don’t know that WordPress considers a point release to be a major upgrade (i.e. going from 3.1 to 3.2 is a full new version of WP, but 3.2 to 3.2.1 is not). They need to understand that, so when they do upgrade, they know what they’re getting into and aren’t surprised by, say, a new admin menu.
Cron isn’t reliable, since Apple uses launchd. I’m not the only person who grumbles about this. I know cron. I don’t know launchd, having never had a reason to learn it, so this took some doing. And no, I’m not using a GUI app to write this stuff for me, like LingonApp, since ti feel if I do that I won’t learn how it works.
This is actually a request. The server that runs Ipstenu.org hosts three other domains. I set up my