Thanks for reading. And stick around after the excitement of the BART shooting dies down.

There’s always something going on here.

Sounds like someone knocked permissions while working on the server rather than anything too deliberate mind.

Release of liability and all that. At the very least you can tell go daddy what to fix (if i had a dime for everytime i had to talk to a hosting company to upgrade their damn web portals and whatnot.)

Permissions can and do often get screwed up. Its a mistake and it should be easy to fix.

The problem is that the phone support folks at GoDaddy probably aren’t system administrators, so they don’t understand the concepts of permissions.

I’d suggest finding a hosting company that has admins and techs that understand what is going on. Often times smaller ISPs and Web Hosting companies are nice because you build an actual relationship.

-k

Ah, but you can – do it yourself! Okay, there’s a learning curve but once it’s all set up you only have your ISP to worry about. It worked for me!

ps.. yes, I know it’s a lot of work but if you’re getting that much hassle it’ll be worth it..

I actually have the Super-Cache plug-in installed, but obviously it didn’t make much of a difference here.

I’m on a month-to-month basis with Go Daddy for this very reason. I had issues like this with Lunar Pages that never got resolved.

So now I’m going to keep looking for another host. Meanwhile, Go Daddy has this new offer called “Grid Hosting” which is where your blog is connected to many servers, or something like that, and it’s supposed to reduce the chances of the blog going down during high traffic.

I signed up for it so we’ll see how it goes.

I really hate having to keep searching for new hosting companies because it’s such a hassle to have to switch over.

Thanks for mentioning the post on my blog.

So far as the ‘Digg Effect’ you may want to look into a WordPress plugin called wp-super-cache that’s supposed to help with that on self-hosted WordPress blogs. I also recommend that you look into hosting other than GoDaddy because, as you discovered, they can be less than helpful at times.

I really enjoyed reading your blog too. I’ve been noticing how the police departments around the US have become more militarized in the past 15 years or so. We don’t need a solider playing police officer in Baghdad and we don’t need a police officer playing soldier in Miami.

One can always move to WordPress and not host their own site, as I did when I first launched this blog.

The main reason I switched was because they only offer you limited themes (templates). However, these themes are even more limited in Blogger.

I actually liked my theme except it was restricted to two columns, and I’m a newspaper man, so I wanted three columns.

Besides, once you host your own site, you have more control of it. It’s the difference between renting and owning.

So it really boils down to whether or not you have long-term plans for your blog or not.

I do have long-term plans because I will continue to blog even after my case is over, which was not the idea when I first launched the two-column blog back in April 2007.

I actually thought it would last less than a month because my trial was scheduled in a couple of weeks.

But then they kept delaying my blog, and in the meantime, people were sending me story tips.

So by the end of 2007, when I switched to three-columns, I realized I was onto something. Not only an outlet for my journalist skills and passions, but a niche that needed to be filled.

And that’s where the problem comes in.

Every time I post a story like the Amtrak story, which does not get covered by the mainstream media, my blog ends up going through “the Digg effect” because it gets huge readership.

To me, that’s a sign of success and proves the media doesn’t have the news judgment it likes to believe it does.

But it also means I have to figure out a way to handle this sudden increase in readership.

But this is part of the responsibility when you own, rather than when you rent.

So I guess the main question is, would a Blogger blog handle the “Digg effect” better than a self-hosted WordPress blog?

Perhaps.

But then you do a little research and discover a little item that says that if you blog on Blogger, Google owns you content.

Now that might not matter to you, but it does to me, considering all the original content I publish on this blog, including words, photos and videos.

Especially considering that I sometimes write stories that the media refuses to write.

You might find this link interesting.

http://optempo.com/2008/01/22/niche-blog-hosting-wordpress-vs-blogger/