Blessed by the Potato

I don’t know what’s changed behind the scenes, but it looks like my domain host is no longer handling the URL forwarding for my site properly. It used to be that it would forward the holypotato.com part to [MY_IP]/blog which would allow you to add on the location of any particular post [ /?p=XXX ] to create a link for any particular page. It was a little annoying (couldn’t just cut and paste from the address bar), but it worked at least. Now though, things are all screwy and that’s not working. More importantly, my hidden/administrative subdomains [ xxx.holypotato.com ] that I used to direct me to certain parts of the site for admin stuff or my own personal file bank home-away-from-home are also taking me to the main page, which is bad. So far that’s annoying but not critical — reading, commenting, and as you can see, authoring are all still working fine. The RSS feeds (which oddly enough do use the same URL structure as trying to link to a specific page) appear to still work.

I’m working on seeing what I can do — bear with me, especially if the site goes dead for a little while while I fiddle.

Update: Ok, I know what’s changed behind the scenes. Domain Direct, part of TuCows, who used to be, way way back in the day in league with Rogers (or took over a registrar that was), where I bought the holypotato.com domain from originally, has been shut down and its operations taken over by Hover, another part of TuCows with substantially inferior service. Everyone on the support forums is complaining that the redirection to individual pages isn’t working. Just logging in to the support forums took 20 minutes. So it doesn’t look like there’s going to be an easy fix for this from them, which means it’s probably time to go host shopping again.

Update Jan 23/09: At first Hover tried to pass this off by saying that “page-level redirection” was a premium service that not many people wanted, and consolidating the Domain Direct and other registrars meant cutting some fat… but after a number of people complained about it, it appears to be mostly fixed (I’m still having an issue with the favicon, but I can live with that).