Yahoo Small business webhosting is down

at the moment. What is interesting is that some of my sakraft.com blogs seem to be showing content, just not background images. I guess its good to not put all of your eggs in one basket (I ♥ blogger, except when it craps out too). When I try to go through the admin site to contact them it just leads me to a site-wide message:

Open System Status Messages

System Status Message
08/01/11

06:27 AM PST: Unable to view web sites

Some Yahoo! Small Business customers may have difficulties accessing their web sites.

Customers may see a "Page Cannot Be Displayed" or "The connection has timed out" error message while trying to view their web sites.

We are aware of this issue and are working to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.

I just hope my database info is intact. I'm kind of afraid to attempt making a backup while the front end of my site(s) are still down...

Blogger FTP "migration"

I host this blog on blogger and always have, but some of my other blogs like my Pirate Shackand wedding blog are hosted on my own server. Blogger announced they were shutting down FTP recently and they kept promising a tool. But the tool they delivered is not great. Its probably best for people who don't mind switching to a blogspot.com address. But I wanted to keep my same subdomains.

To do this you have to do a couple of things. You have to go to your webhost and set up a CNAME entry in your DNS settings. This redirects the url of your old blog to look at blogger instead of your server (as a side effect, everying under the CNAME subdomain that you are redirecting is no longer accessible to your blog). So, because of that thing in parens in the last sentence you actually need to set up another subdomain as a missing files host and put all the files in there (pictures, mp3s, layout items you were hosting locally). This new subdomain is a missing files host. Your stuff under the original subdomain is still there but you can't point any links or references to them because that CNAME thing is telling all requests for that subdomain to look at blogger's servers, not your servers (so anything actually stored in your server space can't actually be accessed from the web. But its still there if you go looking around in FTP).

You have to go into the blogger dashboard and set it up for a custom domain. You have to specify a missing files host, and this can't be the same as your original subdomain, cause like I said, that CNAME thing in your DNS setting will always tell the browser to look for stuff on bloggers servers, not yours. So for wedding.sakraft.com I set up wedding2.sakraft.com as a missing files host and copied everything from the original subdomain folder into the "wedding2" folder. I set wedding2.sakraft.com as my missing files host in the blogger dashboard for my wedding blog.

This stuff is not explained very well in the migration documentation. It is also not a perfect solution, in my opinion. Anyone that bookmarked my gallery page and not the wedding blog itself is out of luck, unless they go back to my blog and find what is basically a new url for it (or just add a "2" after wedding in the url), but who wants to do that?

I was going to write more of a how to but I got frustrated and went to go and shave. Hopefully there is something here that helps someone. Hopefully it will help me when I go to migrate The Pirate Shack. My wedding blog is already migrated. So thats the difference.

How to add a background image to your blog

Last month I told you how to add a custom header to a blogger blog that uses the minima template. If you also add a background image, you can really make it pop. I'm not talking about some repeating image of your sister's cat or the starship enterprise, I mean some much better. Check out my wedding blog to see what I mean. You can use a background image separate the main area from the side areas.

To do that, you need to make an image in photoshop that has a middle area that is at least 660 pixels wide (the width of the header). You should leave this area clear of an patterns, borders, etc. On the edges outside of this middle area you can put some borders and gradients that fade into what will be the background color of the page. For an example, check out this image. The white area in the middle is for the blog content (as you see it on the wedding blog). The image is tall because of my repeating background. If you don't have a repeating background or you have a simpler one, it does not have to be as tall. Smaller is better as it will load faster. The tan you see at the very edges of the image is what the background color will be set to for the body in the CSS of the template.

Once you have an image that is wide enough, you will need to put it up on you server or where ever you host images. Then you will need to put a wrapper div just inside the <body> tags in the template, like this:

<body>
<div id="superWrapper">

<!-- There should be lots of stuff in you template here! -->

</div>
</body>

Then, between the style tags further up in the template, you need to style the superWrapper div like this"

#superWrapper {
margin: 0px auto; /* this centers the div */
width : 700 px; /* make this the width of your background image */
background-image: url(http://yoursite.com/assets/background.gif);
background-repeat: repeat-y;
}

You will also want to change the background color of you page in your CSS. This towards the top your CSS. It is probably white (#fff) or black (#000) by default (in the minima template). Change this color to match the edge of your background image.

I mostly wrote this to remember for myself, so you are probably pretty darned confused by now. Plus I'm half asleep. So if none of this makes sense when I'm more awake, I'll either add to it or take the post down. Cheers!

Yet another blog I've Started

I have another new blog called Wikipedia Daily, where me, my brother and our friend Neil post random things from Wikipedia that we think are interesting or funny. This is my first blog where people that I've invited actually sign up and collaborated!

Other blogs I maintain (other than this one):
The Pirate Shack, a blog about pirates.
Ellen & Scott, a wedding stuff blog.
Art Gallery, where I post public domain artwork.
Amok Literature, the short attention span reading room.
Scott's Video Blog, videos of all shapes and sizes.

Plus there are some other blogs in my blogger account that I don't use much.

New blog headers

I finally got around to making some new blog headers. They're simple, but they make the pages look a lot better than the standard header you get with the blogger Minima template (see the header on this page for an example of that). The new headers appear on The Pirate Shack and on my wedding website. In a future post, I will tell you how to add your very own header to the Minima template.