Recently, my website has again been slow. I've had to cool my heels waiting for content, and I've noticed that the LiveJournal RSS feed for this 'blog has repeatedly been thwarted by server time-out.

Last night and this morning, for a while, the site was really dragging. And a post that I'd made seemed to evaporate, then reäppear after I'd composed and posted a replacement, then vanish again. My inference is that FourBucks.net at some point was trying to resolve problems, and that the flitting into-and-out-of existence of that post was symptomatic of servers being swapped or of various back-ups over-writing each other.

It would have been better if FourBucks.net had locked things for maintenance, and declared themselves as doing so. Some 'blogger could have written a rather lengthy post and then seen his or her work utterly erased.

As well as continuing to desire an unusual amount of sleep, I notice that I have a persisting sensation of white noise. I'm definitely ill, though the symptoms remain low-level.

I did, at least, get PHPMailer working for me at PraxioLogic.com. That's good, because I've been approached to creäte a small website for a client, which would use such functionality, and FourBucks are probably the folks to host it, as its traffic should be relatively light and as the client apparently only wants one domain.

I may have some low-grade illness. I fell asleep relatively early and quite quickly on Thursday night. Though yester-day morning I awoke from a dream that had left me furious and nauseated (it involved child abuse), I thought that I'd otherwise got enough sleep. But I fell asleep again in mid-after-noon, thinking that I'd nap for perhaps 20 minutes — I left my computer, albeït in its backpack, on the foot of my bed — and, instead, I slept until late at night. And for the last few hours I have been increasingly sleepy.

In other thrilling news, I'm having trouble getting various pieces of PHP code working for me on the FourBucks server that I use for two of my domains, but I'm largely working blind, since I don't have administrative privileges for the operating system itself. One of my subscribers here hasn't been able to add his OpenID to his account here. And I've not been able to get PHPMailer working at PraxioLogic.com.

I think that when next one of my hosting subscriptions comes-up for renewal, I am going to migrate from FourBucks.net to AN Hosting, unless FourBucks.net introduces a more competitive package in the mean-time.

With just one domain and low traffic, the FourBucks.net entry-level package is the better buy. But it appears that when one has two or more domains to be hosted, the AN Hosting becomes the better choice.

Addendum: I will in any case continue using this domain name, and the change should be transparent to visitors.

The Woman of Interest and I each noted that our websites had been slow and unresponsive, so yester-day after-noon I contacted technical support at FourBucks.net. A technician got back to me, reporting that he’d found nothing amiss on their server but noted that our sites draw upon resources on other servers, and suggesting that perhaps the problem was there. This explanation seemed plausible, except that shortly after I received it we found that first cpanel and then simple FTP were slowing to an effective halt. When I checked a few hours later, the sites seemed to work fine more generally. So I think that our support query was vindicated.

The string oeconomist (or œconomist) is an old-fashioned spelling of economist. I am an economist; whether I would be seen as an old-fashioned economist would be a function of what one saw of my premises, methods, and conclusions.

I am not the first person to have registered this site-name. The last previous registration expired on 4 September 2007. A check of the Wayback Machine turned-up no archived pages, so perhaps the name were never actually assigned to a site.

Various people have previously used oeconomist as a regular identifier. I am not amongst them. (In particular, I am not (and never have been) the oeconomist at LiveJournal and at Infotrope.)

The site name is registered with GoDaddy. They're not wonderful as a registration service, but they're acceptable.

Hosting is provided by FourBucks.net, so named because, if one orders their package of lowest price and one pays for their services a year at a time, the charge comes to about US$4 per month. I first went to FourBucks.net to get hosting for a different site a few years ago, at the recommendation of Ronnie Ashlock, who used and uses it to host Surlybird.com.

A while back, FourBucks.net was purchased by IDAGroup LLC. When last I knew, they'd not seemlessly integrated support. And AT&T has a proclivity to treat e.mail from FourBucks.net as spam.

The 'blogging software that I'm presently using is WordPress. At the suggestion of Gaal, I added support for OpenID. I did this by installing a plug-in, WP-OpenID. Another plug-in, Post Levels, allows me to assign levels to posts and to registered users, such that when users are logged into the site they are able to read any posts at or below the level of their registration. And YATCP modifies the interface to support a tree structure of comments (so that comments meant in reply to other comments are nested under then and so forth). I also added WP-Polls, mostly just for minor fun. And I will look into Edit Comments XT, to give commenters an opportunity to fix typos and to withdraw things written in haste.