I just received some memorable customer support from host-tracker.com, a well-known website “uptime” monitoring service based in the Ukraine.

I was near the end of my full feature free trial when I was contacted by “Artem” (I won’t reveal his last name for privacy reasons) by email.

I wrote back to say it wasn’t monitoring my sites properly. It said I had zero uptime, when clearly this isn’t true.

He said he’d work with me to fix that. I wrote back and said he doesn’t have to because I’ve looked at my needs and the free plan is the only thing I need right now anyway. I didn’t really think we could resolve the problem without a great deal of effort.

And in a way, I was right. Without mentioning money or a full service plan, Artem wrote back and immediately began helping me solve it with clear and insightful instructions and QUESTIONS. I am a big believer in asking questions to solve a problem.
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I was doing some research on commenting systems for blogs, after temporarily not finding the correct way to turn my new hand coded website design into a WordPress theme.

UPDATE Monday September 23rd: Successfully installed WordPress. Post continues from original date…

I’ve been putting thought into that one off and on for a few days and get error after error.

Well, to console myself I entered a few search strings into Google. I read about the different problems people have with comment databases using software hosted on their own servers.

I was reading one post by Loren at Incremental Blogger, a business tech blog. Loren’s comments stopped working in July of ’06. When I tried to leave a comment today, they’re still broken — over one year later!

The reason I wanted to comment and ended up sending Loren an email instead is because I came across this gem:
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