Yesterday evening, I was having trouble getting my blog to autopost to Facebook and Twitter. I didn’t know if I’d misconfigured the plugins or if it was a problem with my webhost. Turns out it was the latter. Dreamhost has an absurdly low threshold for memory usage on shared accounts — and apparently, I had enough WordPress plugins installed to cause their autokill script to start autokilling, which basically brought the whole thing to a crawl and/or didn’t load pages. I really didn’t have that many plugins loaded. Just Akismet (anti-spam), a Google Analytics plugin, a cacher, and the autoposters. In another hosting environment, it probably would have been just fine. I eventually wound up getting a twitterfeed.com account, which will scan my blog’s RSS feeds periodically and post to various social networks. Doing the work to get them up and running was a good exercise, but I’m at a point in my life where I’m just happy to see it run. I have no desire to blow all my free time fixing something the hard way unless the payoff is really super rad.

I’ve had such a weird love/hate relationship with Dreamhost. On one hand, I got in during an insanely good deal and got to lock in a $10/mo price on unlimited space and bandwidth forever, and there’s lots of cool features. On the other, if I want to do anything even remotely out of a narrow scope of stuff they think is OK, it’s not gonna happen. I realize this is just a feature of shared hosting, but it just seems asinine.

When I was writing the @dndnext bot, I wanted to run a Perl module on a timed schedule to post updates. Their version of the Net::Twitter module was older than time, and they wouldn’t update it “because it might break other people’s code”. And I get that principle. I really do. Except Twitter had since switched to OAuth authentication over a year ago, and the version they had installed would never ever work in a million years. They had me trying to use CPAN to install some modules locally for myself, but some permissions issues came up, and eventually they told me I was on my own. So, anytime you saw an update, it was me running Strawberry Perl on my local machine. Laaaaaame.

But, as I said before, they are cheap and I do find their service useful. I just get what I pay for.

Oh well. It’s my morning to sleep in tomorrow, so I’m going to listen to some old Protracker modules and do something incredibly nonproductive now. Hell yeah.