I noticed an article on the New York Times today that Network Solutions (aka www.netsol.com) has a policy of registering domain names that people search for. This was news to me, as I’ve always used them. Much to my chagrin, it is true - the domain name I searched for the other day - which I’ll withhold due to a reason outlined below - is now reserved by Network Solutions. What sneaky bastards. They’re apparently doing this to prevent scamming, but how does make this different from the scammers?
Of course, I had to call them and find out for myself. It turns out that the domain name is only ‘reserved,’ and can be purchased at the NetSol site for a whopping $35. I’ve always paid between $6-10 for a domain. I suppose it helps their business, since there are probably others like me who have used them to search and bought elsewhere. I won’t be doing that again.
The one positive is that they will release the domain to be registered by others after 4 days. So I can, apparently, register it on the 13th. It’s not as horrible as it initially sounded, but I wonder where the policy will go from here.
This past week we got stumbled. StumbleUpon.com is a website sharing social network, and someone liked my 5 reasons to move to Costa Rica. There was a DRAMATIC effect on our traffic - we went from some 20-ish visits per day to over 8,000 in 2 days. The majority of the visits were less than 1 minute, but a few people took the time to read and some did comment. Our feed subscriptions also increased by more than double, but I was immediately skeptical as to how many new people would actually continue subscribing.
Our traffic seems to be back to normal, though it’s hard to tell now since it’s the weekend, and the feed subscribers have dropped to just 40% more than before instead of 130%. I do think that some of the new subscribers will keep reading, and I feel good about the comment from the person who had never considered Costa Rica before. I suppose the big winner out of this experience was our host, as I didn’t notice any performance issues at all that day inspite of the insane traffic.
I’ve been bored with our old design for quite some time and finally got the time over the last week to refresh it. It took a few tries before Trish ok’d a design - she’s suprisingly averse to change in some ways. I felt that our our changed outlook on life - defining our dream and actively working towards it - needed to be reflected in our blog design. My goal was to make the blog brighter and more open, with colors that reflected a beautiful sunny day. The colors were inspired by the grass image that’s been in our header for ages, and by the bright blue sky that stretched forever in Costa Rica.
This is my first WordPress theme from scratch - the previous theme we used was hacked from another theme. All the WordPress code used to throw me for a loop, but it’s been well over a year and the php stuff makes a lot more sense now. This design is still a work-in-progress, and I need to add some little touches to make lists easier to read, etc. I also have to iron out some weirdness with Internet Explorer 6 and other browser anomalies. If you happen to see something that doesn’t look right, I’d love it if you could bring it to my attention. When the design is totally complete, I’m going to release a less-personalized version for free for others to use on their WordPress blogs.
I’d also love it if I could get a ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ on the design 
I should’ve done a speedtest while in Cahuita (where my guesstimate is 256 kb/s down, 64 kb/s up), but better late than never. San Antonio de Belen, a suburb north of San Jose. The download speed here (949 kb/s) is great - I get almost 1500 kb/s at best in the States. The upload is solid, definitely doable. Frankly I’m just glad that it’s fast enough to be usable.
Apparently, the server that our site is hosted on died 2 days ago. Our host, AN Hosting, has been quick and diligent about moving everything to a brand-spanking new server. The problem was hardware-related and should not resurface.
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