Category Archives: Discourse.net

I find Dreamhost to be pretty decent web hosts, although I also could give you a short but pungent list of complaints (timeouts, timeouts, timeouts). But give them credit, when they screw up, they are world champions at writing apologies.

This morning I got a large bill that clearly wasn't due. I wrote back. They said it was my bill. I wrote back. Then I got The Apology:

Ack. Through a COMPLETE bumbling on our part, we've accidentally attempted to charge you for the ENTIRE year of 2008 (and probably 2009!) ALREADY (it was all due to a fat finger)!

I'm really really realllly embarassed about this, but you have nothing to worry about. Please ignore any confusing billing messages you may have received recently; I've already removed all those bum future charges on your account (######) and already refunded the $####.## charge on your credit card.

You should get the money back on almost immediately, within a day or two max, and there's no need to contact your credit card company or bank for the refund.

Again, I feel terrible about this whole thing.. there will be a blog post soon at blog.dreamhost.com fully explaining how this bug was even allowed to happen..

Thank you very very much for your patience with this.. we PROMISE this won't happen again. There's no need to reply to this message unless of course you have any other questions at all!

Sorry again,

Josh!

And, indeed, a more detailed explanation is now on their blog, at Um, Whoops..

This sort of stuff works on me. It is very hard to stay mad.

Update: More at Unofficial Dreamhost Blog, DreamHost Accidently Bills Customers $7,500,000.

I've been trying a few small tweaks to fix the problem where comments time out just before finishing; the comment posts, but you get an error message anyway. This is why there are so many duplicated comments.

Please, if you do get an error message posting a comment, or if something new goes wrong, drop me an email letting me know the time you posted it and what happened, so I can look at the logs.

Some time in the last couple of days, while I was distracted, this blog had its two millionth page view according to the deeply flawed Sitemeter metric. The far, far stricter unique counter, which won't count you more than once a day, hasn't even hit a million yet. Then again, in this day of RSS newsreaders, I suspect that about half my readers never hit the blog at all but just take the full-text feed.

This blog is a strange enterprise: it's neither narrowly focused on one subject, as are many of the best law blogs, nor is it run by a collection of interesting people as are many of the others. I suppose it's a bit quirky. Perhaps that reflects something about the author.

I remain humbled by the wonderful people who seem to think my hobby is worth their time and especially those who write to me or post comments. Over time, some readers have been kind enough to describe themselves, and you, kind reader, are invited to join in (names optional) if you are so minded.

That high?

Spurred by this post, I went to technorati.com to see what Discourse.net's rankings were.

According to technorati.com, this blog currently has an “Authority” of 229, and a “rank” of 23,628.

Authority seems to mean no more than “the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months”. That's not “authority” — at best it is a measure of inter-blog popularity. And rank is just a measure of relative inter-blog linkularity: “Technorati Rank is calculated based on how far you are from the top. The blog with the hightest [sic] Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog. The smaller your Technorati Rank, the closer you are to the top.”

When I started blogging, I cared about this sort of stuff; now I can't seem to care very much. Is that a sign of maturity, or that it's time to stop?

Happy Halloween.

Only scary posts today!