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For reasons that still aren't clear, my hosting service — Total Choice Hosting — abruptly cut off access to L.A. Observed this afternoon. Luckily the break was temporary, but I still haven't received any notification of what happened or why — only a semi-official denial that "well it looks OK now." Not good enough, so I'm pursuing it further. Meanwhile I have about thirty emails in my in-box from readers who wondered why they suddenly got an "account suspended" notice. I'd like to know the answer myself.
One bit of good tech news. The friendly IT folks at the L.A. Times have been working to figure out with Total Choice why Times staffers trying to read L.A. Observed in the past few weeks have often gotten error messages. Today they fixed it. One of the two main LAT servers had been blocked by Total Choice, apparently because of high traffic. I'm not happy about that either, but I want to talk over the issues with someone in authority at Total Choice before giving up and switching hosts again. I'd guess, though, that it's now unavoidable that I update to the latest version of Movable Type. That may involve a couple of days of down time, so I'll try to pick a light weekend to do the deed.