WOW – How I love A Small Orange

I love A Small Orange web hosting! Beck’s Cafe was down and, with one email, the A Small Orange team had it back up and perking!!

WordPress.Com is a wonderful solution but if you are hosting your own version of WordPress I’d suggest you consider A Small Orange, they are juicy!!

So blogging at Beck’s Cafe is back on

Becks Cafe at beckscafe.com down

I have no idea what the deal is but Beck’s Cafe at  http://www.beckscafe.com is down.    The error message when I try to reach the Cafe is:

Can’t select database

We were able to connect to the database server (which means your username and password is okay) but not able to select the becki_wordpress database.

• Are you sure it exists?
• On some systems the name of your database is prefixed with your username, so it would be like username_wordpress. Could that be the problem?

If you don’t know how to setup a database you should contact your host. If all else fails you may find help at the WordPress Support Forums.

That’s the same message whether I try to get there through the WP Dashboard or just get to the site.  It’s not dead as I can reach the site via cPanel and ftp.   I’ve checked MySQL for Beck’s Cafe and I can’t see what’s wrong…at least it’s not obvious to me anyway.

I’ll be asking the team at A Small Orange what I can do here….stay tuned

No, this blog isn’t dead…it’s a sign post

Hi there, if you’ve come to this Beck’s Cafe it’s run by the same woman that runs that other Beck’s Cafe.   This one was set up to get that rockin’ awesome key so we could implement Akismet to eat the spam mice that come for the crumbs at Beck’s Cafe.

SO, this blog gets posted to very rarely….so come for the fresh brew over at my site, Beck’s Cafe (also proudly powered by WordPress).

And one more thing…

Oh Beck’s Cafe still happily uses WordPress and is still hosted on A Small Orange.   A Small Orange has been flawless for months since my January posting “infuriated“ 

Things are still perkin’ at Becks’ Cafe

Life is still perkin’ along at Beck’s Cafe.  We’re doing considerable amount of redesign again.  We are now using Sandbox which will bring us such goodies as:

• A new base structure that is future extensible
• advanced, semantics-based theme
• Beautiful on the inside
• For WordPress 2.0.2 through 2.2.x
• Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional
• Widgets plugin-friendly
• hAtom and hCard microformats (XFN was already built into WordPress)
• You can totally customize it with CSS alone—no need to bother with other files.

So quite a bit really.  Working with CSS has been alot easier than I’d thought it would be really.  I’d say tweaking a design is about the same work.  Being able to modify Sandbox just via CSS is, in some ways, a welcome relief really.

So come visit Beck’s Cafe to see what is new

Infuriated

I like to blog at night…when the moon is out and bats fly. It’s just the way I am. Or maybe it’s from too much coffee. Hard to say. But when I do blog at night the thing I hate the most is that my host provider, A Small Orange, goes down RIGHT on the server I’m using.

Why this appears to be so everytime I want to write I’ll never know.

But I am really getting steamed over this – and not the kind of steamed we use to make hot milk with at the Cafe.

HOPEFULLY Beck’s Cafe will be up soon so I can write by the light of the moon.

Ahhh back to writing

Upgrading my main blog-site, Beck’s Cafe, took a bit of effort. It felt like it should have taken less effort but given WordPress.org can’t validate every theme, plug-in and widget for backward compatibility I think it was reasonable. The site’s back up and running now. I love my new theme, Chameleon, but I have to admit I was totally jealous of the richness of Beck’s and Posh’s blog at http://becksposhnosh.blogspot.com/

Visually it is stunning and warm and the writing and content are wonderful. It’s given me new inspiration to write, to be accessible in my writing, and to have Beck’s Cafe be a place you feel at home at when visiting (and re-visiting as well).

Testing trackbacks and link backs

Checking the trackbacks and link backs since I upgraded the main Beck’s Cafe to WordPress 2.04

I hope the construction is going to work, so far the links section is messed up and its frustrating tyring to get it fixed in 2.04 when in 2.02 it worked flawlessly.

So a little update

So I’m very happy having moved from Typepad to a self-hosted blog at A Small Orange and WordPress 2.02 It has given me a much more stable platform, outstanding SPAM trapping and, surprisingly, my blog readership has increased about 10x over Typepad. I don’t know if that’s due to better distribution, a better looking blog or what but it’s pretty neat.

I also have to say that if I were to do it again I would start with WordPress.com and skip Typepad. Typepad is a very nice platform, but the things that have been done here at WordPress.com are quite amazing. The themes, the ease of use and ease of customizing themes, the strong infrastructure and the simpler and cleaner WordPress software. It’s pretty impressive really. You can actually get a highly personal blog here for no money.

Becks Cafe is officially located at http://www.beckscafe.com 

Beck’s Cafe and themage

I am really liking Beck's Cafe now. At Typepad, things felt somewhat constrained and limited. With Beck's Cafe on WordPress and A Small Orange, I'm feeling pretty good that I can do pretty much whatever I like. The theme part though is something I have to play with. I like using what I have now, wp-andreas09, but I'm yearning for these new simple themes that are coming out now. The point of Beck's Cafe is the writing, the content and hopefully the dialogue around it. Does my current theme and color scheme help or hinder that? I'm not sure. The black and white coloration emphasizes the writing, but looks so drab. The color seems to pull people's eyes back to the sidebars away from the core writing – maybe it's just me. So we'll see.

In the meantime, feel free to plop on over to Beck's Cafe for a look, a cup of coffee and a read