#oneaday Day 223: The Old Internet

As the rot economy continues apace, more and more people are starting to recognise the modern Web for what it is: an unpleasant place, in which commercial interests and venture capitalists come first, and making an actually pleasant, enjoyable and educational place for the actual users is far, far down the list. As a result, "the old Internet" is often romanticised, perhaps to an overly nostalgic, rose-tinted degree, but I have to kind of concur; things did used to be much more enjoyable online before our daily routine was nothing but scrolling through the only two or three websites that actually exist to most people.

I think about this a lot when I'm writing on here or MoeGamer. I used to get fairly decent numbers on both blogs, even though I was just posting daily nonsense on this one. Now, I get maybe double figures daily on here, if that. MoeGamer still pulls in about a thousand views a day, which is nice, but a lot of those views are for things I wrote about several years ago at this point, and rarely for things I've written about recently.

Now, I don't do either this blog or MoeGamer for the views, but I feel the trajectory this site has taken in terms of numbers is symptomatic of the way the Web has changed over the years. People just don't do blogs any more, either as writers or readers. Part of this is down to the fact that RSS readers just aren't a part of people's daily online routine any more (though I'm aware they still exist) — and even those "magazine-style" apps that were never really a good replacement for Google Reader seem to have died a bit of a death. Not only that, but the usefulness of search engines has declined considerably, too.

Instead, it is, of course, all about social media. It's all about having a presence on the "important" social networks — though even that has seen something of an upset over the last few years, and particularly in the last few months. Twitter was already circling the drain in terms of usefulness for sharing stuff even before Elon took over and did… whatever the fuck he's doing there; Facebook has been such a horrible experience to use for so long now that I question the sanity of anyone who is still using it — to say nothing of the frankly quite disturbing policy changes they've had recently; and the less said about TikTok, the better.

So what, exactly, is someone looking to express themselves online to do today? If you want to get seen, you seemingly have little choice but to sign your soul over to one of these companies and plunge your data into the mire that is "The Algorithm". Telling people that they should start their own website is a noble and proper goal, and one I stand behind, but the fact is… a lot of folks just don't and won't leave social media — and many of the social media companies are doing their best to keep those folks on their platform as much as possible.

Look at Twitter (no, I'm not calling it "X") and how Elon is desperate for people to "post content" on it, completely failing to see that it is a platform woefully ill-equipped for anything other than that which it was originally designed for: microblogging. No-one in their right mind is going to set up a video-centric Twitter account instead of a YouTube channel, even if the site wasn't infested with the worst bigots the Internet has to offer. And no writer is ever going to use Twitter as their primary means of posting their work.

Everyone knows this. And yet it's so difficult to get people to notice you if you're not spending all day "building your personal brand" or some such bullshit. Artists struggle to get commissions without social media. Writers struggle to get publishers without social media. Video makers struggle to get views on their videos without social media. It all sucks, and it feels far too late to be able to do anything about it.

All you can do, really, is just be stubborn. Keep plugging away at your own personal passion projects, and do those projects for the passion, not for the potential of monetising them. I keep doing this blog because I like writing and it's good therapy for me — nothing more. It's always a thoroughly welcome sight when I see someone I recognise in the comments, but that's becoming an increasingly rare occurrence these days. Family and friends who used to read on a regular basis just… don't any more, and the worst thing is, I completely understand why. The modern Web simply isn't built to support personal sites any more, and that's a real shame. It feels like we're very much at risk of losing an important part of our collective culture — because what happens to everyone's "content" (ugh) when one of these social media companies eventually implodes?

Anyway, close your Meta accounts, get off Twitter and read more blogs. That's my advice for surviving online today.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 219: Getting it done

I finally managed to muster up the motivation to make some YouTube videos today. Three of them, in fact; they'll be up on the channel over the course of the next week or so.

To be clear, I wasn't putting off making these videos because I didn't want to make them; I was primarily putting them off because I had a cold in mid-December, and it's left me with a really annoying cough but no other symptoms. (I went to the doctor to see if it was an infection or anything, and it seems there's nothing to be concerned about; I just Have A Cough for a bit, frustratingly.)

I didn't want to start recording videos and collapse into a coughing fit partway through, so I'd been putting it off, particularly as a couple of weekends ago I started trying to record a The Dagger of Amon Ra playthrough and had to stop because my throat wasn't up to it.

My cough is still here — mostly in the evenings, and especially annoyingly when I lie down to go to sleep — but I managed to hold it at bay for the duration of three videos earlier, which is nice. Those three videos are kicking off something I want to be doing throughout this year: exploring a variety of home computer stuff, including Spectrum, Amiga and C64 stuff as well as the Atari 8-bit and ST stuff I've primarily built my channel on.

It felt good to finally get them done. While I have no real "obligations" towards my YouTube channel and could just… stop making videos at any point with no real consequence, it would feel like a great shame to do so. I have somehow made 1,303 videos so far since I created my channel in 2007 (but didn't start Being A Creator until to any vaguely serious degree until 2017) and my channel has shown very slow but steady growth, particularly over the course of the last five years or so. I don't have any grand designs on Being A YouTuber as a career, particularly since the sort of stuff I do isn't exactly algorithm-baiting, but it is nice to be able to sit down, play some games, talk about them to an empty room and feel like at least a few people will, eventually, listen.

In some respects, being able to do that with YouTube has almost been a substitute for being able to spend time with friends talking about this stuff. Pretty much all of my friends who used to be into gaming to any degree have drifted away for one reason or another, and it really sucks to be enthusiastic about things and have no-one to share that with. So by handling my YouTube videos the way I do — as if I'm sitting playing it with the viewer there as a friend beside me — it at least helps a bit with that side of things, if not all of the loneliness I feel at times.

Anyway, like I say, those videos will be coming out over the next week or so. There's one Spectrum one, one C64 one and one Atari 8-bit one; I'm not necessarily going to do all that every week (at least partly because I want to do some ST and Amiga stuff in there too) but it's a nice spread to start the year with. And it's onwards to a whole new year of exploring classic home computers and the myriad weird and wonderful games they played host to!

If you're not yet subscribed, stop by my channel, watch a few vids and hit the dang subscribe button already. Here's a link. Go on, click it.

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#oneaday Day 217: Fuck Facebook, and fuck Meta

I don't know if you've been following the recent news about Meta, Facebook's parent company, but if you still have an account over there for any reason, I thought you might be interested to learn the following.

A few days ago, Meta (which covers Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp Messenger) published some substantial changes to its Hateful Conduct policy, ostensibly a policy that was devised in order to, among other things, help marginalised groups feel safe using their services as a means of online socialisation. You can see the changelog at this link (click the "7 Jan 2025" link on the left of that page to see the changes highlighted), but here are some notable parts for your convenience:

The green highlighted stuff is newly added, the red strikethrough stuff has been removed. Note that the banning of "dehumanising speech in the form of comparisons to or generalisations about animals, pathogens or other sub-human life forms, including women as household objects or property or objects in general; black people as farm equipment; transgender or non-binary people as 'it'" has been removed. This was previously a "Tier 1" violation, among the most serious on the platform, and yet now it is A-OK.

Elsewhere:

In this section, you will see that Meta now "allows allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like 'weird'."

Elsewhere still:

So you're cool to, like, blame the Chinese or whatever group of Johnny Foreigners you think created COVID, if you even believe COVID existed at all in the first place because you're a nutcase who believes vaccination programmes are about Bill Gates trying to fit you with a microtransmitter.

I shouldn't have to point out that these changes are Bad, regardless of whether or not you fall into one of the "protected" categories. It's particularly telling that amid the parts people are mostly focusing on — the stuff about homosexual and transgender people — they snuck in a bit about regarding women as objects and black people as farm equipment. You know, just to make sure everyone except white straight cis men gets their own share of a kicking. On top of that, they have deleted the trans and non-binary themes for Facebook Messenger, as well as the blog post announcing them.

This is not a "freedom of speech" thing; this is deliberately courting the worst people in the world and giving them carte blanche to be as sexist, racist, homophobic and transphobic as they desire with zero consequences. And you all know exactly why this has happened: because of the election result in the US.

The world's billionaires have been flocking to kiss Trump's ringpiece ever since the election, and of course Mark Zuckerberg is at the head of the queue. Social media is a veritable breeding ground for the worst kind of right-wing attitudes and has been for a while; all Zuck is doing is making it explicitly okay for this sort of thing to go on, much like Elon Musk has done with Twitter, destroying its value as social media in the process.

This isn't the only thing wrong with Facebook, of course. If you're still using it (again, I ask, why?) you have almost certainly seen how the News Feed or whatever it is called has declined over the years. Chances are yours has multiple "Suggested" posts (i.e. ads) in a row before you see anything from someone you actually care about, and many of those posts will be filled with AI-generated garbage slop like the infamous "Shrimp Jesus" and the many, many images of crying multiple amputee soldiers who don't exist saying it's their birthday. And rather than Facebook seeing this as a problem, it is being encouraged.

In fact, Meta announced plans to introduce AI-driven profiles to both Facebook and Instagram, presumably in an attempt to hide the fact that users are (correctly) leaving their services in droves. People stumbled across one of these AI-powered profiles on Instagram recently, discovering it to be, of course, full of images that never happened and hosting a chatbot that was little more than racial stereotyping. Meta were quick to say that this was an experiment from a few years back, but this is exactly the sort of shit they want to introduce.

Along the same lines, some Instagram users have found themselves presented with AI-generated images of themselves in their own feed, without having asked for them. In most cases, this is because Instagram's AI features count "using them once" as "perpetual consent to use your likeness", even if you don't want or need AI-generated images of yourself. Which no-one does.

Facebook is a shithole, and it's only going to get worse. If I haven't convinced you enough, I urge you to read at least some of the following links (plus the ones I've peppered throughout the above) for more on the story, because these folks report on this stuff for a living and can provide a lot more detail on what is going on.

Never Forgive Them by Ed Zitron – a comprehensive breakdown of how, over the last 10-15 years in particular, big tech has been systematically making life worse for everyone online under the guise of "growth". And it seeps into all areas of life, be it Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media, or a cheap laptop you buy from Amazon.

AI Powered Buzzfeed Ads Suggest You Buy Hat of Man Who Died by Suicide by Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media. Not directly related to Meta, though it is a tale of why AI-powered anything relating to advertising (a category which Meta stuff firmly falls into) is a pile of shit. I will say 404 Media has been doing some of the absolute best reporting on all this for quite some time now.

Zuckerberg: The AI Slop Will Continue Until Morale Improves by Jason Koebler, 404 Media. About how Zuckerberg doesn't believe the AI sludge that is taking over Facebook is a problem, and how he actually wants to encourage it.

Where Facebook's AI Slop Comes From by Jason Koebler, 404 Media. Self-explanatory, though you may be surprised at the answer to the headline and the reasons why.

Mark Zuckerberg, Recipient of World's First Rat Penis Transplant, Announces Meta Will Stop Fact-Checking by Matt Husser, The Hard Times. Also self-explanatory. The fact-checking thing is actually where all this started; Zuck is putting this side of things in the hands of the users via a Twitter-style "Community Notes" system, rather than having fact-checkers to combat disinformation on staff. Things just got worse from there.

Meta has 'heard the message' from Trump, says whistleblower Frances Haugen by Dan Milmo and Robert Booth, The Guardian. Some insider knowledge on the situation and how it's happening exactly because of the reasons you thought.

Look, I get it. I appreciate that some of you might not be able to delete your Facebook accounts because it's the only means you have of getting in touch with some people. I can't really delete mine either, because I have to use it for work, though I haven't used Facebook "personally" for years now because I saw it enshittifying a long time ago and jumped ship. The only Meta service I use these days — and that's irregularly — is WhatsApp.

But I would urge you to look over all of the above, and consider whether that is a company you still want to have any involvement with. Not only are the policy changes above actively harmful, the service as a whole has, as Zitron explains in his piece linked above, gradually been getting worse and worse, abusing its users in the name of profit and growth, for years at this point.

There are always alternatives. You can email people, just like in the good old days, or alternative messaging solutions like Discord, Zoom and Skype exist. They all have their issues, yes, but they're not actively being harmful like Meta is now. You can build a website to share your photos. Hell, if you're hooked on social media, there are plenty of better alternatives to Facebook now. (Just don't join TikTok.)

Online is a garbage fire right now, and it's only getting worse. One day, we might be able to look back on this whole sorry situation and laugh, but right now it's getting to a point where it's outright dangerous for some folks online. And I would hope that you, dear reader, don't want to be part of making that problem any worse.

If you didn't know anything about any of this prior to today, I hope you feel a little better informed now. And if you did, I'd urge you to take that step and move well away from Meta as soon as you are able.

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#oneaday Day 216: I've probably written all of this before

There are, as I type this, 2,850 posts on this blog. 2,851 including this one. As such, I've almost certainly written things multiple times. Yesterday's story about The Rough Book is one I've told before, for example, and even found myself using some of the same turns of phrase to describe various incidents.

But I think it's interesting to reflect back on things multiple times, many years apart, because doing so can cause you to look at those situations from a new perspective, perhaps with different life experiences under your belt. In the case of The Rough Book, I last wrote about it in 2012, when I didn't know I was autistic. Or, perhaps, when I hadn't been diagnosed as autistic. Because even in those innocent, pre-COVID days, I think I always knew that something was "up", as it were.

Hell, I mean, even COVID. Life has not been the same on Planet Earth since the pandemic hit, and many folks (including, I suspect, me and my wife) are still feeling the aftereffects (or perhaps it's more accurate to say ongoing effects) of the situation, thanks to the lack of understanding around things like "Long COVID" and suchlike.

It's hard to say if my life has got better or worse as time has gone on, looking back at these old posts and realising all the topics I've previously written about. I think, on the whole, I'm in a much better situation than I ever have been in every regard except for my physical health; I've had lower lows of mental health in particular (catastrophically low lows on multiple occasions) and I certainly have very little to complain about with my present employment situation.

I have found a niche and I'm damn well staying there as long as possible; I have no desire to ever go back to the periods of joblessness I've endured over the years. Even with the experience I've built up over the course of the past few years, I still feel like if I was suddenly out of work that I would struggle to cope in today's volatile, competitive job market. I have been very fortunate with the situation I've ended up in from that perspective. I took some risks to get here, in some ways it took an uncharacteristic amount of persistence, and I actually think the pandemic helped me secure the position I'm in now thanks to how it made remote working feasible for everyone.

I like having this blog, and being able to look back over the posts, particularly with the "Random Post" button at the top, then following a rabbit hole of "related posts". Of course, I have a big gap between the end of my first #oneaday stint and this one, but other things online — like MoeGamer and YouTube, for example — fill that gap to some degree. This is why I was so upset when WordPress.com pulled their whole "your blog has been deleted, teehee" shit a while back. This site isn't useful from a perspective of… well, anything, really, other than giving me a semi-private outlet to muse on whatever subjects I feel like writing about. But, goddammit, it's mine, and it's not beholden to any platform holders who can arbitrarily take it away from me. Not any more, anyway.

I don't get anywhere near the readership I used to with this blog. I don't even think my family and friends read it any more. I don't think anyone reads blogs any more, because they're too busy doomscrolling on social media or shit like TikTok. And while I hate that personally, I can't really tell other people what they "should" be doing, when the stuff I'm posting here is probably just as vapid as all the people yelling at the camera on TikTok.

Or is it? There's probably a whole discussion for another post in this, but I can say with complete honesty that what I've written here over the years has been an accurate reflection of me. I've always made a point of being honest — to myself as much as anyone who might be reading — while TikTok, from my admittedly limited experience to it, feels obnoxiously performative. Oddly, despite TikTok in theory being more "personal" thanks to being video-based — you see and hear the person — I still feel much more like I'm getting to know someone when I read what they write, rather than seeing them yelling breathlessly into their phone camera like the world's least scary follow-up to The Blair Witch Project.

It saddens me a bit that blogs aren't what they used to be. Hell, most people don't even call them "blogs" any more; these days they tend to be described as "newsletters", and most of them seem to be read via email rather than actually on their websites. But I'm still resolutely old-school in how I do things; this is my blog, and has been since (checks) 2008. And there's no real point changing up how I do things now, is there?

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#oneaday Day 210: Making some video plans

I was hoping to make more videos over the course of December for "DOScember", but a nasty cold with a cough that's been lingering for a while (and still is a bit) put paid to those plans. I was really hoping to play through both The Dagger of Amon Ra and the spiritual successor to the Laura Bow series, The Crimson Diamond, but that hasn't happened. I did start trying to record a The Dagger of Amon Ra playthrough, but my throat gave out in less than ten minutes, so I abandoned that plan.

I mean, there's no reason they still can't happen, they just won't be "DOScember" features any more. And that's fine. So I think I may well still go ahead with those, 'cause doing adventure game playthroughs is always a lot of fun.

I've been pondering other things to do along the way, too. One thing I definitely want to do is spend some time exploring other microcomputer systems alongside the Atari stuff I've done a bunch of to date. There was some interesting discussion on Bluesky earlier today about how the overly "Americanised" canon of gaming history has a habit of erasing stuff like the European microcomputer scene, so I want to spend some time redressing the balance there a bit. I've obviously done a lot of Atari stuff already, and I intend to keep going that because it's a personal passion, but I also want to make some use of the C64 "Maxi", TheA500 Mini and The Spectrum that I have, because those are all thoroughly lovely machines.

As good a place as any to start with those would be to work through the built-in games on each, since that's actually not something I've done to date for anything other than The400 Mini. So a cautious plan I have is to spend a bit of time exploring each of those systems' built-in libraries, then onward into some other stuff on each of those platforms, just like I've done with the Atari 8-bit.

Assuming my voice holds out, then, I think that's what I'm going to try and make a start on this weekend, along with maybe a bit of The Dagger of Amon Ra.

I've also reached a conclusion I think I've known all along: I am absolutely not cut out for streaming. I just can't be arsed with it. It's a lot of setup and effort to get going, it's a pain to promote (particularly given my potential audience is all over the globe and thus there's no "good" timezone for it) and the number of viewers I get (both live and on the archived version on YouTube) is crap compared to my standard videos. I know that's something that improves with time, but this is supposed to be a hobby, not work, so I'm just going to stick with what I know and enjoy, and which works well — which is YouTube.

I'm not ruling out occasional "special" streams for events, charity drives and suchlike, or occasional chats with my buddy Chris in a quasi-podcast format. But I'm not going to make it a regular part of my routine. I know several people who want desperately to "make it" as a streamer, and they seem to spend a lot of their lives being miserable, and I have no desire to get into that situation. I do this for fun.

So, amid a bit of game room reorganisation that may be happening this weekend, I'm going to make a start on another year of retro computing fun. Broadening my remit will be an interesting journey for me to take, and it may well bring some new people to the channel, too. I know from previous times I've done this that there are a couple of people who get a bit sniffy when I cover non-Atari stuff, but y'know what? My channel, my rules. I am interested in gaming and microcomputer history, and while Atari stuff will always carry significant personal meaning for me, I want to know more about the other parts of this side of things, too.

So that means C64, Spectrum and Amiga stuff! There's a huge library of things for me to explore on all of those platforms, and still plenty of Atari material I haven't covered, either. So I certainly don't think I'm going to be short of things to play and talk about this year. Now I just need to make the dang videos!

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#oneaday Day 203: A distressing dichotomy

I am, as you'll know if you've been reading this here blog for a while, suffering from a fair old bit of loneliness. As the years have gone by, groups of friends have gradually drifted away, and it feels like one of the longest holdouts in that regard is heading in that direction of late. I haven't heard from anyone in this group for probably several months at this point, and to be honest, I'm burnt out.

Here's my problem, see: I'm lonely, but I'm also absolutely exhausted feeling like the only one trying to make an effort to keep friendships going or to try and "fit in" places. I'm a member of several online communities (well, let's be real, Discord servers at this point, since self-contained online communities barely seem to be a thing any more) but the prospect of trying to raise my head, say hello and generally get "noticed" in some way is just… deflating. It almost doesn't feel worth the effort. It feels like fighting my way out of quicksand.

Take this group I'm referring to, for example. I have been feeling for quite some time that if I don't say something and attempt to start a conversation, no-one says anything. And indeed, I must confess, over the past few months I simply haven't said anything, just to see if that was actually the case. I had gotten tired, you see, of every time I attempted to start a conversation resulting in the things I said getting either shut down or ignored. In particular, I have tried to express enthusiasm for the things I've worked on professionally — which I'm very proud of — and my own creative projects — which likewise I want to share with people who are important to me — and have found myself rebuffed. And it seems no-one wants to talk about anything that is important to them, either, so silence it is.

This is not a healthy way to be, I know, but I feel frustrated and resentful any time I feel like I'm the only one who has been making an effort with a friendship. And so, day by day, I feel myself retreating further into my own private world, and feeling less inclined to want to come out and show myself.

Well, no. It's not that. It's that I find doing so to be immensely draining, particularly when it's in an environment or situation I find uncomfortable. Take our work Christmas outing recently for example; while we were out there were several people who clearly wanted to make an effort to get to know me a bit better, and I had those conversations where I could — but because we were in an inordinately noisy environment where it was very difficult (and uncomfortable) to have a conversation, I didn't feel like I could really carry things on. It was too tiring. I felt bad, because it was people showing an honest interest in me, but I just couldn't keep trying to have a conversation while I couldn't hear anything.

I ended up bowing out of the evening relatively early because my senses had just been completely overwhelmed by the noise. I had a good time overall; I just knew I couldn't take any more.

It sort of feels like a variation on that at other times. I don't want to be a lonely recluse who never talks to anyone, but when I never get anything back when I do attempt to initiate something — and when no-one else seemingly wants to initiate things with me without me prompting them — I get to a point where it just doesn't feel worth trying any more, which I fear will eventually build into actively pushing people away if and when they do ever reach out.

Perhaps the thing to do is just to accept that this is the way things are, and to try and structure my life accordingly. If people aren't going to make the effort themselves but they are still, for one reason or another, actually important to me, then I make some time to ensure that I get heard. It doesn't have to be much; perhaps just set aside a time each week to drop a quick message to the group in an attempt to start a conversation. That feels very formal, I know, and that's one of the reasons I haven't done something like this sooner — but right now it feels like doing something overtly "artificial-feeling" might be the only way I get my almost completely drained "Social" meter back up into the green.

I should probably mention at this point that I am inordinately grateful to my good pal Chris, who has stuck by me through exceedingly thick and enormously thin, and always has a kind word and receptive ear any time I drop him a message. The only trouble is he's on the other side of the world to me, so not someone I can just drop in on for some beers and video games.

My wife Andie is and always has been a rock, too, and any time I start feeling lonely I am grateful that I am not completely alone, thanks to her, our two cats (who both know to come and look after me when I'm feeling low — they're both sat with me on the sofa as I type this) and, of course, my family, who just accept me as I am, with all my myriad flaws.

Is that enough, though? It doesn't feel like enough. Something in my mind remains intensely dissatisfied in my socialisation, and I need to do something about it. So, as tempting as it is to just wallow in despair at things gradually getting worse on their own without my input… I guess it's time to acknowledge that I need to provide that input if I ever want things to get better again.

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#oneaday Day 196: Migration complete!

We sorted out the problems MoeGamer was having. If you happen to care, the problem I was having was this: the site itself appeared to be working just fine, but a number of image links were broken, the Media Library appeared to be full of empty images and attempting to hotlink to files that I knew were there was throwing a 404 "Not Found" error.

The solution was surprisingly simple. On my former Bluehost account, MoeGamer was hosted in a subdirectory of the public_html folder, and the domain name had been pointed to that subdirectory as its document root. That means if you went to moegamer.net, it would assume you meant "[the address of my hosting]/public_html/[the subfolder name]" rather than just the more conventional "[the address of my hosting/public_html/".

The problem stemmed from the fact that once my domain had been mapped to my Zume hosting instead, the document root was set to public_html rather than the subfolder, and that meant it wasn't quite looking in the right place for lots of things — most notably images hosted on the site that weren't being delivered via content delivery network, and plugins for WordPress.

The solution was simple: move all the MoeGamer files out of that subfolder into public_html and now everything is sorted and working as it should do. I'm glad; I was worried this was going to be a whole palaver to fix, but it turned out to be something pretty simple. It's just fortunate that I spotted the discrepancy when I did; I had a feeling Bluehost had done something "non-standard" when I hosted my sites with them, so I followed a hunch and it turned out to be correct.

I have little doubt that the guy helping me from Zume's support desk would have figured it out before long, though. Zume's customer service during this whole migration has been absolutely exemplary. And because they promise "same-day migration" but were unable to achieve this with Bluehost's dumbass setup, they've given me a free month of hosting as compensation. I didn't ask for this nor did I indicate I was in any way dissatisfied with their service; they just gave it to me. Top-notch stuff.

I know this was a whole faff, but hopefully I won't have to do it again for a while. Fingers crossed that Zume 1) sticks around and 2) doesn't get bought up by the company that made Bluehost (who used to be good!) shit. And in the meantime, I feel like both this site and MoeGamer have seen a significant performance increase, which is great.

Anyway, with that nonsense over, I can perhaps get back to more regular updates over on MoeGamer. I have a few games that I want to write about, but I've been holding off while all this was sorted. Perhaps I shall be spending some time writing tomorrow!

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#oneaday Day 195: Migration... almost complete?

Well, it seems my migration to a new web host has been mostly successfully completed. Both this site and MoeGamer are now safely ensconced on Zume's servers, and the nameservers have been switched over. There's a few little issues here and there which I'm hoping will resolve themselves as the DNS propagates or whatever it has to do, but other than that, things are looking pretty good!

I have to give a huge shout-out to Ross from Zume's support here, as he was inordinately patient with Bluehost's many, many attempts to make it as difficult as possible to just transfer your website from one place to another. Bluehost, like many other sites these days, seemingly insist on making you use a chat facility to get any sort of support, and, like most chat support services, seems to be staffed almost exclusively by people who don't really know what they're talking about. This meant it took several separate chat sessions by me to get them to do something approaching what we needed to perform the migration, and even then they still did it wrong multiple times.

I have confidence, though, that even if there are any lingering issues from the migration, Zume's support staff will be able to sort them out. Like I say, I'm hoping that most of these will be resolved by the DNS propagation completing, so I'm not going to worry too much about things for a few days. And in the meantime, it's nice to know that I can just get on with blogging here; I didn't even lose any posts from the last few days, which is great.

Anyway, that's that. If you happen to see any weirdness here or on MoeGamer for the next couple of days, that's why. Hopefully it will all be sorted soon, and we can return to business as usual!

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#oneaday Day 193: Migration woes

I was suspicious when the new hosting provider I've signed up with, Zume, offered "same-day migration" — not because I doubted their abilities, but because I doubted my current/prior host, Bluehost, would make it in any way easy to get everything off their servers and onto someone else's.

Turns out I was correct. Migrating a complete website setup like mine should be a case of going into cPanel and exporting something called a "cpmove" archive, which contains everything about the website: all its content, all its configuration, everything. Naturally, this is only something you can export yourself on a more expensive plan than I'm on, leading to multiple conversations with support people via a bloody chat interface, during which they consistently failed to understand what I was asking of them, despite me spelling it out to them very clearly and repeatedly.

The first time they ran the export, it seemingly worked correctly and created an archive, but said archive was, for some reason, faulty — and in the meantime, it had filled up my hosting account's storage space. So I then had to delete that and spend another couple of hours waiting for the person on the other end of the chat to run another export, only for them to first of all misunderstand the fact that I wanted to export two websites (this one and MoeGamer) not just this one, and then to completely miss the whole "cpmove" part.

Thankfully, the representative from Zume that I've been dealing with has been inordinately patient throughout this entire process, and has been keeping me informed on progress. It seems that he will be able to complete the migration without the "cpmove" part, it'll just take a bit longer to get things set up. I'm fine with this; I'm not in a rush to get it done, so I'd rather it be done right than done fast.

Self-hosting your own website certainly gives you more flexibility than being locked in to something like WordPress.com — to say nothing of the inherent risks of hosting your entire website on someone else's service — but man, it is a pain in the arse when something like this happens. And make no mistake: this is happening because Bluehost are deceptive fuckers who gave absolutely no indication when I signed up that their prices were going to increase this much after a year. We're talking an increase from about £60 to nearly £300. Absurd. And I bet they count on people just thinking "eh, I can't be bothered to fix it, so I'll just pay up".

Well, no. I'm not paying up. I'm looking forward to hitting the big red "CANCEL" button when all my sites are successfully transferred over, and here's hoping that Zume lasts at least a few years before enshittifying itself, too.

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#oneaday Day 191: Moving online home again?

Annoyingly, it's looking like I'm going to have to uproot this here site and MoeGamer yet again, because my current host has increased the annual price of hosting by literally about four times over the supposedly "introductory" offer I wasn't aware that I was on. Reading around, it seems this company — Bluehost, 'cause I'm going to name and shame — is notorious for doing this, and I am just the latest of many people to fall foul of it. So don't use Bluehost.

Thankfully, I have seen a few recommendations floating around, and I think the one I'm probably going to go with is Zume. This is a UK-based hosting service that comes particularly recommended by the nerds on r/webhosting, plus they supposedly do a free complete migration and you can pay monthly — though of course, as always, it works out more expensive to do that than paying for a year or two up front. Honestly, I think I'd rather have a predictable £10 a month than £X every year or two, though, as that's much easier to budget for.

I'm probably going to start the process for this going tomorrow. Supposedly they'll get the whole shebang done same-day, but it remains to be seen if that actually is the case. This is, I guess, then, your official warning that there may be some unexpected downtime both here and on MoeGamer at some point in the next couple of days.

I wish I didn't have to do this, as moving "online home" is almost as frustrating as having to move your real home. Granted, there's a lot less putting things in boxes and cleaning, but there's still a laundry list of things you need to remember to do — and inevitably an equally as long list of things that you have already forgotten that you need to do. But, well, I'm not paying nearly £300 for a year's web hosting, because that is daylight fucking robbery. £10 a month? Fine. I am 100% okay with that.

Here's hoping that 1) Zume sticks around for the long term, 2) Zume doesn't get eaten by a big corpo that jacks up prices to an absurd degree and 3) the whole migration process goes smoothly. Fingers crossed, and further updates as events warrant.

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