r-l-w.net

Stumbling Out of the Gate

January 15th, 2008

I had great ambitions about once again becoming a frequent Internet publisher and even was for a couple of days. Then just as I was about to log into WordPress to work on a post called “Day of 100 Eagles” (which I have not yet written, so you haven’t missed it), I learned the hard way that the domain name registration reseller I’d used for several years had turned to the dark side.

I had paid my money and the transaction had cleared and the admin interface on their website showed the expiration date of r-l-w.net to be 2009, but it was not resolving. I checked with tucows who was the upstream vendor to the reseller in question and it showed the expiration date as 2009, but this turned out not to be the case.

The reseller was unreachable by telephone or email and when I read this I started to get worried that not only was I gonna get juked out of $15, but that with my domain in unreachable limbo I would lose it to some front-running, domain taster.

After reading the blog post above I immediately posted complaints to InterNic and OpenSRS, which is the part of Tucows that deals with domain names. Then I disabled domain locking via my bad reseller’s admin interface and opened a ticket with my hosting company to transfer the domain. I was hopeful, but not optimistic that the bad reseller would not impede the transfer.

Surprisingly, the next day I actually got an email in response to the complaint I had filed with OpenSRS. I was given a login to administer my domain directly on OpenSRS and the advice to request a “reseller to reseller transfer” from a different reseller. I appended this info to my ticket at the hosting company and crossed my fingers.

Fortunately, as you can tell by the fact that you are reading this, everything turned out OK. My host got the domain renewed and transferred. I even got a follow-up email from OpenSRS asking if everything turned out OK.

The funny thing about it is that when I couldn’t get to the domain, posting to this site was in my mind like unto an itch in the middle of the bottom of the right foot when wearing cowboy boots in heavy highway traffic. All I wanted to do was scratch that itch, but there was just no way.

Then when it finally got fixed it was such a relief. It was like the old gag about hitting yourself with a hammer cause it felt so good to quit. So when it was resolving again on January 11 (four days ago) the very first thing I did was scratch that itch and write this post, right?

If that were the case you would have already read this post.

But, instead of dwelling on falling off the horse, I’m getting right back on (in my own sweet time) and just moving forward. In fact, I even did some work on upgrading this WordPress installation- all the way up to date with 2.32, and tinkering a bit to smooth out some of the rough edges on my theme (which you may or may not notice, but which had been irritating me a little bit and are now “smooth like a rhapsody” though I’m not sure it qualifies as a masterpiece).

So, I’m back in business writing on the Internet. My life is still pretty dull though, so don’t expect amazing adventures or anything… Unless I start writing fiction or something (but don’t hold your breath for that either).