Good morning! It’s Thursday. That means that it’s actually been really since Sunday that I really got to put fingers to keys and just dig into this whole stupid idol thing. IT WAS AWFUL.

So, first, thanks for bearing with me and being good sports in general, those of you who bore with me and were good sports in general. It was a haul. And, like, a cautionary tale for those of you who entertain the idea of having your own site — I mean, do it, because doing it is good, but also be careful.

People have been asking me what-happened-Maniac ever since things started to go boots up on Monday, and I literally didn’t know until yesterday, but get this: NECRONOMIDOL BROKE MY WEBSITE. Or, more specifically, the extra surge of traffic from Krv’s show review (I’m working on getting your photo gallery restored, buddy) and Kerrie’s interview, driven in large part by the photo gallery plugin and — as you may have noticed recently — a lot of lag in general, made my server just up and quit. Or, as the extra nerdy kids call it, my site was throttled.

So great job to everybody, from Himari on to Hadd!

Saga-wise, beginning Monday morning at about 8:00 a.m. my time, I:

• Contacted support seven different times
• Initially received three different diagnoses for the problem on the first three contacts
• Got some good, insightful help from a person who then immediately un-did their good work because I asked them how they did it, and they wanted to show me, but then couldn’t replicate it
• Was told by the next person that they simply weren’t permitted to do any such thing
• Got sent 22 links from a help library when I asked how I could sufficiently optimize my site
• Had the final helpdesker just plain stop responding when I pointed out that, yes, the actual functional code on the website may be at the root of the problem, but they’re the ones who control the server, and so they can very easily temporarily move my files to another location so as to free up disk space for me to do what I needed to do
• In the end, got some variation of “you could always just optimize for ” and solve this right away five different times from four different people

So, because I’m as petty and spiteful as I am handsome and clever, I am now hosted on a brand-new server with a brand-new hosting company on a much better plan than I had before for less money than I would’ve had to spend to stay with the jerks!

You may have noticed that the site runs much faster now! It’ll probably stay that way, too, because I’m on a good server and streamlined my site along the way.

Unfortunately, I had to miss out on a lot of good stuff this week. It was a really good week! But I don’t want to just leave this gaping hole in the history of Homicidols.com, so hold on to your butts — there’s gonna be a lot of crap coming out today!

P.S.
Re: that cautionary tale that I hinted at, never, ever host with Bluehost if you can help it. Alex warned me last year that they’re super sketchy after a while and have a tendency to mess with your code, and that’s exactly what happened with me. Ignore the recommendation from WordPress; there are plenty of more reputable hosts that are just as affordable.