I finally decided to do some housecleaning on the website. I noticed that the old theme didn’t seem to fully work with the latest version of WordPress so I’ve changed it to something that may or may not be temporary. I also noticed that apparently someone had gained access to the webserver and there was porn stashed into some other /blogs directory — so some much needed housecleaning was necessary. I had some stale wikis, forums, etc. that may have allowed elevated privileges, so those have also been removed.

I find myself not really having a ton of time to blog, but this was a good reminder that I need to keep things tidy and up-to-date at the least.

So, I finally decided to remove the weekly twitter blog posts. It was completely redundant — if you wanted to see what I post on twitter, you would’ve followed me @jbctech. It made the blog look terrible (even though I never update it). I hope to try to get back into this in the near future. For those who are still following, don’t give up.

Well, I apparently completely suck at this internet blog thing.  Shortly after working with the PR people at NetApp to get my own blog, I wrote a few short articles on installation of some of the products I work on and then…quit updating.  I tell myself I have excuses — a lot has happened in the last year.   I always have a hard time prioritizing updating the blog, whether it be my professional one or this one.  Looking at the last post, it’s now been over a year since my last update.  So, I guess I should go ahead and say “Happy New Year!” even though that was weeks ago!

I doubt anyone reads this personal blog or even looks anymore, since well — I haven’t been updating.  But, as I said, a lot has happened in the last year.  Last year around this time, we found out that my wife, Rebecca was pregnant.  Then, in October, our baby girl Kaitlyn was born.  It’s been an incredibly exciting time – I can’t believe she’s almost four months old now.  So, in between staying incredibly busy at work, spending time with my family and playing Warcraft I haven’t had any time to blog.

So, with the blog – a few months ago, I logged in (probably because I had around 300-400 spam messages that weren’t caught by Akismet) and realized that my WordPress was incredibly out of date.  So, I updated to the latest released version and that broke my theme.  I decided to stick with the default theme until I found time to update the site again.  Well, as you can see – I chose this new theme, which looks decent and is much easier to update than the previous one.

This domain name has been my home on the internet for over 11 years now.  So, I’m going to wrap this post up by saying – I can’t guarantee that I’ll keep this updated regularly, but I’m going to try.

I now have a second blog going on blogs.netapp.com.  It will be where all work-related postings go.  So, if you’re here looking for my random work related thoughts, please check out my new blog:

 WHU Who!?

If you usually visit jbctech.com, you may have noticed that the site was redirected to an advertisement page for the last two days.  That’s because I forgot to renew my domain name.  I’ve owned jbctech.com for the last 11-12 years and have never let it expire like that.  I believe the registrar only has me as the owner for the last 8 but I’ve changed domain registrars a number of times.  At any rate, jbctech.com is back online….I can once again receive email.  Still no new content here other than this post…been super busy at work lately. 

Yesterday, you may have noticed that the blog was down.  I recently switched hosting providers and had to move the data over.  As it turns out, everything appears to be fully functional again.  The backup from the previous hosting provider was a bit over a gigabyte – that included my IMAP mail as well as the entire site.  I was able to move my mail back over without losing anything and the MySQL databases also imported successfully.  All in all – a very smooth move.

My friend RBChallenger from Lightning-Alley.com informed me that jbctech.com is worth around $19K on the LeapFish Domain appraisal site. Well…I don’t know about that, but I can tell you this: if anyone offered half that much for the domain, I’d be a fool not to accept!  Here’s some other interesting ones:

Microsoft.com — $132.6M
Yahoo.com — $1.5B
MSN.com — $1.8B
Google.com — $898.5M
Netapp.com — $5.3M
IBM.com — $283.1M

[tags]domain, appraisal, leapfish[/tags]

Well, everyone – I apologize. It’s funny – since I moved to North Carolina, I’ve had a hard time keeping in touch with people. When I do get time to catch up, they always mention the blog – and there I go not updating it. I’ve been so incredibly busy lately at work that I haven’t had much time to update this. As a matter of fact, I was showing someone something on the site the other day and it didn’t even work. So, today I went through and fixed all of the little quirks that the site had. Everything seems to be functional again – and I finally got a chance to moderate the 44 pending messages for review (most of which were spam, of course). However, it’s good to note that Akismet once again saved the day – my total count is now up to over 48,800 messages caught as spam by that thing. That’s incredible!

I’ll try not to take so long in between posts this time…

Since this is a personal blog, I thought I’d go ahead and make the domain name match as such, so today, JamesMBurke.com went live.  It may take up to 72 hours for the DNS entries to resolve for you, but the site is still accessible via jbctech.com.  I’ve used the jbctech.com domain for a number of years, but have been wanting to switch to something a little more personal.

I also fought with some server troubles tonight with the launch – apparently the hosting provider encountered a hard disk failure and had to move servers.  When they moved my data over to the other server, there were a couple of corrupted files, and it took me about a half hour to get that all resolved.  Luckily, all of my SQL databases were intact.  Ahh the joys of local disks…wouldn’t it be nice if it were on a NetApp SAN.