First, I happened to see a tweet by Bud Hunt asking if edublogosphere.com was broken.

It turns out it was! When I first built the site, I really just made a fancy login for the now defunct ircatwork.com CGI IRC installation. It seems as though the ircatwork.com folks have been taken over by Mibbit. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, it defeats my login script.

So, I went in search of a new solution. I can’t install CGI IRC myself because my host (affiliate link) won’t allow it. I can’t say as though I blame them, as IRC takes a bunch of server load, especially on shared hosting like I am.

From the main page for CGI IRC, I found a link to blitzed.org. I dug around a bit and found their #help channel. I dove in and found some very helpful folks. In no time flat, I created a new #edublogosphere, registered it to myself, and scored ChanOps privileges. As I began to ask around, I actually ended up in a conversation with dg, the author of CGI IRC! That was a treat for me, as I respect anyone who can write software, which I certainly cannot do.

Not only did all that work out, but they’ve said that I can request an exception for the limits imposed on the web-based interface for any time we need it (i.e. NECC, etc). Thanks, blitzed!

So I rang bluehost and changed the CNAME implementation so irc.edublogosphere.com now points to irc.blitzed.org.

Then, I used their script generator to generate a nice login script that works like a charm. Try it out, will you?

Here is a shot of the new home page.