Update:As of today my connection problems have gone away with respect to H411. I am able to connect fine and I understand that the way his site handles load balancing and traffic can lead to issues from time to time (rarely). Both H411 and I have agreed to move forward and continue covering Hoboken to the best of our abilities. Unlike his site my site has no servers under my control so if there is downtime blame Google. :)
Retraction. The response back from H411 is that there was most likely an intermittent connection problem that could have affected some users. H411 is working on a solution. I will try to connect from home tonight. I should have emailed H411 first but the symptoms were that I was being blocked. I jumped the gun on that. In that regard I apologize.
Original Story:
I'm almost 100% sure on this one but it looks like I am being blocked from Hoboken 411. That site has the ability to block certain IP addresses from it's site in such a way that you get a timeout. I thought at first it was my PC at home but then I switched to another network connection and it worked for a while. I was able to comment and then later that network connection too seemed to be blocked. I changed browsers and it still was not connecting. Keep in mind that during this time all other websites were able to connect except for Hoboken 411. I had a friend check on his iPhone and he had no problem connecting so it looks like I am banned!
I hope that is not the case since as many of you know I have given Hoboken 411 a decent amount of content and all for free. Some of it funny, some of it so so. H411 and I did butt heads over a story that was pulled but I agreed to move on. Sometimes that happens. I decided at that point to start my own blog so that way if there was any creative disagreements I could still publish on my terms and hence no conflict. Besides I have a different perspective on things.
In the interest of transparency, I even let him know I had started my own blog and continued to give him content. One of the reasons for me checking his site is to make sure I don't publish the same story since I want to make sure my content is different than his.
I can only be a part time blogger since I have a full time job so I don't see how in anyway my little blog could be any threat to his website traffic. Not sure what the deal is at this point. Some people are hard to figure out. I am surprised too since he is such a free enterprise kind of guy that even if I turned out to be a little competition he would cherish the innovation the free market allows. ◦
