And yes, I realize that my sites are sort of jacked up on IE8, even in Compatibility View. I’m working on new templates for both MO and GunPundit. Hopefully, they’ll be ready shortly.

Hopefully this will be resolved tomorrow.

UPDATE: E-mail problems resolved, though it appears that some stuff may have been lost. Can’t tell for sure. If you sent Murdoc something important over the weekend (including Monday the 7th) please re-send it just to be sure.

Well, more erratic than usual.

UPDATE: Well, that pretty much sucked. Murdoc’s apologies for the interrupted service.

Everyone gets a full refund.

UPDATE 2: Well, it appears that, thanks to abysmal performance on my host’s file manager, Murdoc has managed to lose all the photos from the last several months. Lose as in gone forever. It’s going to be quite a project to get them re-uploaded and all the posts fixed unless there’s some way to retrieve them.

UPDATE 3: Well, it’s a bit of a long story, but I was trying to test something by cloning my site to a test directory. After the test I deleted the clone. Except that instead of COPYING the core files, I somehow MOVED them, meaning the “clone” was, in fact, my real site’s core files. However that happened, once I figured out what happened it was simply a matter of restoring the files I had deleted and moving them back to where they belonged.

Except that the new version of the File Manager doesn’t have a trash bin. The old one did, but the new one doesn’t. I’ve been mystified about why the “new and improved” v3 has no restore functionality when v1 and v2 did, but after contacting support I’ve figured out how this is an improvement.

For a fee, they’ll restore my files.

Ba$tard$.

A GunPundit post is #1 on a Bing search linked from MSN.com today, and traffic was through the roof until the host pulled the plug on the site. After explaining that it was legit traffic due to a temporary spike, the helpful support tech said “Sorry we can’t let it run with this traffic” and said I’d have to upgrade.

I understand that they can’t have one site hogging the majority of the resources on a server, but my sites combined do not pull in the traffic to justify dedicated hosting. I’ve had traffic higher than this in the past, and had no trouble after I installed a cache plug-in to prevent overloads when things spike for a day or two. Not sure why this is a problem today, but it is. I’ve seen where they temporarily move sites experiencing traffic to other servers until things die down, but apparently that isn’t an option for whatever reason.

Unfortunately, they are not telling me how long the site will be down. In fact, they aren’t being helpful at all.

UPDATE: Apparently got escalated. Someone else is at least going through the motions of being helpful. Hopefully I can disable a few things temporarily and be back on the air soon.

Here is what I know about already

1. Rounded corners don’t work

Things are back up now, and hopefully they stay that way.

So let’s give it away!

Leave a comment here if you’d like to be entered in the drawing. The rules will be the same as for the Air & Space Magazine drawing a couple of months ago:

Contest Rules:

• Book will only be mailed to US mailing address. Sorry. No exceptions.
• Murdoc’s immediate family cannot enter.
• Please enter only once.
• Sending Murdoc cash is permissible but will not improve your chances of winning.
• If (and only if) you win you will have to give me your real name and mailing address.
• Winner will be chosen randomly and all results are final.
• Entries must be posted to the site by 2359 hours ET on Wednesday, 1 April 2009
• I can’t think of any more right now but I’ll add them if I do.

To Enter:

• Leave a comment on this post.

That’s all there is to it. Leave a comment and I will have a winner chosen from all entrants using the Random Integer Generator at Random.org. If the random number 13 and you have the 13th comment on the post, you win a copy of Inside Gitmo: The True Story Behind the Myths of Guantanamo Bay. Simple as that.

Shooting Illustrated’s GunsandHunting.com Redesigned

Shooting Illustrated’s GunsandHunting.com has been redesigned with faster navigation, exclusive content, videos and the addition of yet another well-known gun writer to the team, Shelby Murdoc of GunPundit.com fame. Murdoc, a freelance gun writer and columnist specializing in tactical firearms since 2004, has been blogging for six years and his regular installments to GunsandHunting.com add even more depth to the website’s firearm coverage.

All new blogs by each of Shooting Illustrated’s editors are proving to be one of GunsandHunting.com’s most popular new additions, with readers being subjected to ruminations and breaking news on a daily basis. Videos include American Guardian Television host Chad Adams voluntarily getting tazed, a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the Taurus Judge watermelon video, interviews from the SHOT Show and trigger time with a suppressed, fully automatic submachine gun.

Shooting Illustrated’s www.GunsandHunting.com is the Internet’s Definitive Destination for the Modern Shooter.

It’s an honor to join the crew at GunsandHunting. Be sure to check out the site when you get a chance. It’s good and getting better. (Just don’t let that Murdoc guy screw it all up…LOL!)

Since I’m going to continue to be busy with a few things for a while yet, I’m going to do something I’ve been thinking about for a while, and that’s taking more guest posts. What I’m especially looking for would be a photo of some military hardware or personnel and commentary to go with it. The only compensation I can offer is my thanks and a credit in the post. If you’ve got your own site, feel free to cross-post material. Just let me know and I’ll get a link in for you.

If you want to go all-out like Tim’s Civil War Saturday entries, go right ahead. But that level of detail and depth is not at all necessary. I’d like more than a couple of sentences, but a couple of short paragraphs of commentary or opinion would be plenty. Hopefully, we can kick the discussion in the comments area up a notch while we’re at it.

I’m not quite sure about the exact logistics of this yet. I think what would be best would be for anyone interested to send me an email with the photo attached and the commentary in the body. I can’t promise to run everything that gets sent in, but it will all get looked at and considered.

To begin with, I’d like to stick to military topics for this. Any time period is okay, from the ancient world to the hypothetical future. I’d like for most of it to be 20th and 21st Century, though, and any Civil War-era submissions will probably go into Civil War Saturday.

If anyone’s interested, send it on.