It looks like we're back. Fingers firmly crossed.

[still from Clerks, posted by jeremyv]

The short version?

domesticat.net's been parked on omnipotent.net, a machine under Gareth's control, for years. Jeff's been wanting his own space to play, and we liked the idea of parking our sites on the same box. We were in the process of slowly moving domesticat over when a couple of database errors during our vacation caused me to move up the timeframe.

When we got back from [ Washington / Arkansas / Mississippi / if it's Tuesday we're where, exactly? ] I decided to get started on the process. We migrated my mail to gmail ... years and years of inane little emails, all now offered up on the altar of the Goog ... and tarballed all the files on the server.

The good news is that my retinas are okay. The bad news? None really; my vision is stable for the second year in a row and my eyes are fine. I'll call that a win in just about any playbook.

I had a scary incident a few weeks ago. The vision in the central portion of my right eye blurred and began to do what I can only describe as 'sparkle.' There was no pain and no other change, just an area the shape of a crescent moon in my central field of vision that was strangely prismatic.

It went away that same afternoon. Geof was right to question my blood pressure -- low as usual -- and there were no side effects.

I was glad to confirm that all was well. Ever since my mother had her cornea transplant thanks to Fuchs' dystrophy, I've been more aware than usual of how fragile my sense of sight is, and how lost I would be without it.

At long last, it's happened -- the final two drupal modules I've been hoping would be upgraded to version 6.x have received those upgrades. I am now making preparations to make the major leap from drupal version 5.x to 6.x.

In the tradition of all upgrades, this is surely going to cause cat.net to explode. However, better cat.net than my workplace's site. Fewer of you are likely to call my house in outrage.

At least, I'd like to think that's the kind of relationship we have, right?

More updates when we're^H^H^H^H^I'm done. [send tea plz?]

Update, 9:30pm local time: We're not fully back up, but the site is upgraded and most of the modules are functional again. %*@&)! gravatars.

Update, 10:00pm local time: Gravatars still dead. Alphabetical archives live. Monthly archives grring at me. %*@&)! gravatars.

If you're seeing this, the site is back up now. The past two days have been, shall we say, "unfortunately instructional" regarding drupal.

That's the polite way to say, "I know something's wrong, I'm trying out ways to fix it, and it's driving me crazy."

Drupal and I have not been friends this week.

A quick reminder, since some of you may have missed it the first time around. If you're reading cat.net via RSS, you need to actually log in at domesticat.net to get your new RSS feed addresses. Doing so will update the links you currently see below. (You'll see a ?token=[foo] string at the end of the next three lines if you're logged in when you view this post. That's the URL you want to use in your RSS reader from now on.)

So here I am, testing again. I wasn't happy with the last attempt I made at turning an entry private, so I'm going to try this new version out. This latest version is a password-protection on a node-by-node basis. Problem is, I can't test it without posting, and that's going to spray tests around everywhere.

Specifically, I need to know how the node looks if you don't have the password, and I want to know how it acts in an RSS feed.

So let's see what happens....

*posts*