The server hosting this blog was working very slowly and/or not at all over the weekend. Most of the time requests were coming up as a blank page. Initially I thought there was a problem with the configuration, and I upgraded to WordPress 1.5.2 (Strayhorn) without success. However, this morning things were back to normal so I assume that my upgrade in fact worked OK.
My theory is that a site on the server (since it’s a shared server) was making the server go into overdrive due to a bad configuration or hosting some movie file or something, and my pages were timing out. No error messages, just a long wait and then nothing. This spurred me to buying a paid hosting package on a shared server which is a little better managed, with my own domain name. I hope this will work better than my current package which is free space bundled with my ISP ADSL connection.
So this blog will soon be moving to a new home. I should be able to make sure that all links on blogrolls and such are all redirected automatically. Thanks to all of you who managed to post even when the blog was down : I think in fact that those in western US timezones actually hit the blog when the European server was actually responding OK because it was the middle of the night here.
Watch this space, the new domain should be live over the course of this week!