Okay, so the website stuff has been managed. In a nutshell, cPanel, a common tool for hosting websites, was recently subjected to a number of horrible and blatant security issues that fundamentally let people gain root access to a server by typing “lol” as a password. It’s a little more technical than that, but that’s the general idea. In response to this, access to cPanel got frozen by a lot of web hosts. Patches were released (though more vulnerabilities were found in the following days), and in theory my webhost should have let me access my stuff again after it was updated.

They did not, however. Instead, they said my server was just going to stay offline until I bought a new server package, but they’d be happy to migrate my files to the new package whenever they got to me in a queue. A very long queue, because they were doing this to a lot of people. A major security issue had become a very lucrative opportunity for Host Gator, from the feel of it, and while I don’t think this was actually necessary, the “support rep” was obviously just a sales rep with limited or no technical understanding of what was happening, so they probably couldn’t do anything except upsell people to new packages.

So my server got moved, but because I didn’t want to spend days in downtime, I rebuilt the site from an old backup. Sadly we’ve lost most of the Mr. Bumpy articles in this process, but for the most part everything is fine except for broken bookmarks.

Except Spotify.

Now, a lot of people aren’t aware, but Spotify doesn’t do any hosting for me. None of their ads make any money for me. I have basically nothing to do with them except that you can, if you wish, listen to the podcast through them! However, they are sometimes a little weird. Unlike everybody else – if there’s a problem with the RSS, updating the RSS will fix the problem – but with Spotify, for some reason the platform just abandons episodes. It dropped a WWNPDND episode for months because I had a typo in the RSS that was fixed on the same day the episode was released.

I’ve tried handing them their own special-boy RSS named “get it together spotify”, and we’ll see if they use that to update properly, but I don’t know what technical malfunction causes them to be so difficult about this since nobody else has this problem.

The good news is nobody else has this problem! I recognize some people like Spotify and prefer to have their stuff in one place, but they are very closed off to me and there’s not much I can do except helpfully suggest they read the data that literally every other system has no problem reading. In the meanwhile, though, every other RSS reader is having no problems, so you can listen through Apple, Youtube, or even your own private setup. Hopefully Spotify will, in fact, get it together at some point, but this is the tech industry so we just never know.