Temporary email trouble

For a while (a few days, I think) my email address is going to be:

agrumer and then
an AT and then
gmail and then
a DOT and finally
a com, and man isn't that a pain in the ass.

And not long after that I'll be looking for yet another domain registrar. And holy crap, do I not recommend Dotster.

I've been generally annoyed at Dotster because they keep sending me spam about getting .info or .biz or whatever domains, and 000Domains offered a better price, so when grumer.org came up for renewal in March, I transferred. There was some hassle with the transfer, Dotster authorize losing the domain, but a call to tech support cleared that up. Or so I thought.

I'd gotten the email message saying that the transfer had gone through. Dotster kept sending me email warning me that the domain was about to expire, but since they were (I thought) no longer the registry, I ignored it, figuring it was some kind of database bug. Turns out I was wrong on both counts.

Last night, grumer.org stopped resolving, and I was unable to log into my 000Domains account. I fired off some email to 000Domains tech support. I accidentally left the grumer.org address as the reply-to, because gMail's settings feature is still a bit rough. This morning I realized what I had done, so I resent it with the gMail reply-to.

By about 3 PM I still hadn't received a reply, so I phoned customer support. Turns out that Dotster had bought 000Domains a few weeks ago. Also turns out my domain had expired, and was in the reconciliation grace period, and I was gonna have to pay $100 to get it out. This could have been a lot worse. Reconciliation is a new feature of the domain expiration process; before that, my domain would have just expired, some squatter would have picked it up, and I might have been lucky to get it back for $1000.

To make matters weirder, when I log into my Dotster/000Domains account through Dotster, I don't see either of the domains I have registered with them, just grumer.info, which is a freebie Dotster is giving me in the hope that I'll decide to register it when it expires at the end of the year.

So once all the issues resolve and I can be certain my domains are out of limbo, I'm jumping ship again. Not sure where to. Probably Dreamhost, since I'm using them for hosting. First I have to call them and make sure they aren't using Dotster for registration.

Update: OK, that's done with. The domain's back up, the mail's going through on the usual address.

And the thing may have been my fault. It's possible that the problem was me not updating the credit card info with Dotster. Or a combination of that and their having bought 000Domains. I may stick with them, since they've been really quick about resolving the technical issues once I complained.

This little wiki stayed home

TiddlyWiki, by Jeremy Ruston, has for some time been the coolest damn DHTML app I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t think of anything useful to do with it, but damn it’s cool. It’s a self-contained wiki, implemented in JavaScript and CSS, contained in a single HTML page. Its individual elements — what would be pages in most wikis, and are here called tiddles — are DIV sections that become visible as you invoke them, and go away when you close them. All the usual wiki goodies are there — you can edit each tiddle, and link among them, and it’ll build HTML out of simple text markup, etc. The only thing TiddlyWiki was missing when last I looked at it, several months ago, was a convenient way to save your edits.

That problem’s been solved. Now you just save your TiddlyWiki to your local hard drive (or floppy, or USB thumb drive), edit to your heart’s content, and then click the Save link. Works in Firefox; I haven’t tried it in anything else yet. Now you can make copies, email them to people, post them online, carry them around on a USB keychain, whatever.

Nathan Bowers has developed a variant: GTD TiddlyWiki. Designed for use with David Allen’s Getting Things Done personal productivity system, this version sports some neat navigational features (like a sidebar menu that automagically updates based on the MainManu tiddle contents), nice design, and the ability to print your tiddles to 3x5 index cards.