Love of All Wisdom

If you tried to access the blog late last night or early this morning, you might have got a message that “this account has been suspended.” My hosting service, JustHost, apparently decided I had too much CPU usage (on a text site that gets 50-70 page views a day). This happened right after I installed that “possibly related posts” plugin, so I deleted it immediately. I’m hoping that will help, and will try and follow a couple of their tips to keep that from happening again.

But when my yearly contract with JustHost runs out in a couple months, I don’t intend on using them again. They didn’t give me any warning about this, and their email tried to say that because of the high CPU usage I need to move my account to a dedicated server – a shift in cost from $4 a month to $150 a month. They also continually try to “upsell” me, getting me to pay for more services I don’t want. My best impression is that all this is because they’re a gimmicky cheapie service, offering a price (the aforementioned $4 a month) that’s too good to be true. I want to move my service to somewhere I pay a bit more but get treated honestly. (If I’m starting to use too much of your resources, give me a warning, and then let me move up to a different plan that costs a little more than the previous one.)

Readers, do any of you have self-hosted blogs? If you do, what hosting service do you use? How long have you used it? Are you satisfied with it? Have you had problems like this?

I just installed a new WordPress plugin that recommends other recent posts related to the current one, based on similarities in categories. (You’ll see this at the bottom of each post on the site.) I’m trying to decide how useful it is. It generally seems to want to pick posts that are very recent (the last couple weeks); I’d prefer it to go a bit deeper so it’s more useful to people who are discovering the site through a link. I might try and edit the plugin so that it sorts on a different criterion. Or just keep it as is, or delete it. Any opinions?

I just saw a screening of Examined Life, Astra Taylor’s movie about philosophy. It’s a little surprising in the first place to see a movie about philosophy (as opposed to a movie that expresses philosophical ideas, of which there are many). But there’s something about the film that’s in its way even more surprising: although all of the eight philosophers in the film is a professor, only one (Kwame Anthony Appiah) is actually a professor of philosophy. Two of them (Martha Nussbaum and Peter Singer) have minor appointments in philosophy, where they might teach a few philosophy classes on the side but most of their work is done elsewhere. The majority, however, have no current official association with academic philosophy whatsoever. They’re in departments of French and Italian, rhetoric, sociology – anything but philosophy. This despite the fact that every large university and nearly every small college has a philosophy department, full of people who consider themselves philosophers. The film makes no comment on the fact.
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Just a quick note of celebration: the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has just published my article on Śāntideva! If you’ve been wondering what the deal is with this Śāntideva guy I keep talking about, the article should be a good introduction.

The IEP website looks like it’s just undergone a snappy redesign, too. If the last time you visited was several months ago, have another look.

For the first half of next week I’ll be heading to the annual conference of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy – a sort of retreat at Asilomar Conference Grounds in California. It’s my first time attending the SACP, and I’m not sure whether I’ll have time to blog while out there – hopefully I’ll be spending all my time either at talks or talking to other philosophers. I’m not even sure there’s an Internet connection. But one way or another it should provide a lot of fascinating food for thought, which I hope to blog about either during or after the event.

I’m taking a break for the weekend (as I will probably do most weekends). There will be much more next week, so if you’ve enjoyed this blog so far, please come and visit again then! (In a few weeks I’ll establish a more regular, if perhaps slightly less frequent, schedule; I’ll make a public note when I do.)