Spade_Cooley

I'VE FUCKING DONE IT. TAKE THAT PLUSNET YA CUNTS. Hilariously, the domain was still registered to Big Iain. As in, the email address on the domain registry was at least 15 years out of date, possibly more. Now to upload the 14,000 files to get back to square one (if certain pages look out of date or irregular for the next hour or so, don't worry).

Can someone go to the DDP site, if I've done this right what we should have is the homepage with no working links and no pictures. Is that right for everyone?

Naka Drotské

The i is because it's still a print publication. The Independent isn't a print publication so it doesn't count. I know it's arbitrary, but it's at least consistent.

And I was right. In one of the longest ever gaps between a death and a QO, the use of the term "the late Vanessa Lafaye" in this story from The i, means points are a coming.

Pamela Anderson dying but her death not making a single newspaper front page because someone had won £6billion on the lottery. Then later on my late night TV talk show was cancelled after I got #MeToo'd by Lucy Liu. I'm under a lot of stress at work.

Yeah, this is what I was worried would happen. Expect outages over the next 48 hours...

So to clarify. I'm making two broad-ish changes to the DDP for 2019. One, I'm bringing back regional BBC/ITV obits. I know this might open the door for some things people aren't that keen on, but I'd say the main beneficiaries would be mayors, footballers who didn't play top-flight football and entertainers who were only on regional TV/radio. It's no more an advantage than, say, Australia has thanks to the Mail obitting every single convict-descendant that carks it. Two, as alluded above, I'm going to try and switch to rolling updates. Rather than wait for 8/10 celebs carking and doing a front page update, I'm going to treat it like the scoreboard this year - updating as and when they die, or at least within 48 hours of an obit coming through (some of us have jobs). Now the only possible problem with this, which I'm going to be given full disclosure to here, is that the history of the derbydeadpool domain name is a long and varied one. It dates back to the days when you could get free domain names online. The company that provided this was FreeNetName, which I think ceased operations sometime around the release of Westlife's debut album. Their operations were folded into the company Madasafish, which itself was bought out by Plusnet in 2007 (I may have some of these details slightly off, but the timeline is right). So, really, for the past decade the domain name has been owned by a company that doesn't actually exist. As it stands, the way the site works is: deaths are loaded into a database (compiled at the start of the year, this is what causes all the grief between you submitting your entries and the site going live). Then the database is processed through a... thingy. It then spews out the 26 A-Z pages, the deaths this year and the scoreboard pages. Those pages are then uploaded manually, via FTP, to the site. The homepage (as well as the theme team league and the lits of the lost/missed) are compiled manually. As in, HTML coded like you would have in an IT lesson circa 1997. I go into an old HTML editing tool (and they don't make those anymore because nobody programs with HTML in the current year), and type up the deaths, then I manually interlink all the links and so on and so forth. This is time consuming. And depressing. Switching to a rolling blog format will make this much quicker because, hey, it's Wordpress software. We're in the 21st century baby! And it'll look more professional, I have the exact idea in my haed of how I want the site to look and I can get it for under £50. The issue is that as Madasafish doesn't really exist, Plusnet's customer service (which is meant to be the best in telecoms) couldn't give a shit about you. The domain needs transferring over to a new host (in this case, Ionos), that is aware the world has changed in the past 10 years. Madasafish literally only allows FTP transfers. No Wordpress. No SQL. None of the stuff that makes every site run. My ideas about getting the site fully overhauled had to be stymied: to get a programmer to do it would cost north of £300. And as much as I love you guys, I don't love you £300. Plus I acn't be dealing with programmers, absolute nightmare. There are ways the process could be streamlined, but that may be a job for the next man in the saddle (@msc). So that's where we are. To be honest, writing the bios and finding pictures I do not mind, it's kinda fun really. But the way the DDP has operated has been identical really since the days that two hits a week was considered an avalanche of deaths. It'll need a better man than me to change it, but I'm laying the opening groundwork for you here.

Former Charlton/Palace defensive midfielder Darren Pitcher dead at 49. Remember him from that spate of players suing opposition teams for career-ending injuries in the late 90s, his career was effectively over at the age of 26 thanks to a reducer from Huddersfield's Paul Reid.

Today in 1978, the jazz trombonist Frank Rosolino, who had no history of mental illness or criminal record, came home from a nightclub performance (there were no drugs or drink in his system), shot both of his sons through the head while they slept and then took his own life.

And now he's dead.

Elsewhere, terrible manager and part-time Alec Baldwin lookalike Walter Mazzarri will not be in the Torino dugout today due to a "short-term medical emergency". He's had heart surgery in the past.

Confirmed.

Update. First time I've ever updated on Southwestern Trains wi-fi.

Joss Ackland strikes me as a quite DL-y name, he's now 90. Similarly, although only 85, David Bellamy.

PDC World Darts #59 Andrew Gilding and Dunblane gunman Thomas Hamilton

1. Don't pick prisoners on compassionate leave, you know they only bluffing cuz they wanna go home 2. Don't let breast cancer patients in, they have significantly longer stage 4 survival rates than other cancer 3. Don't be Ryan Buell's friend. Seriously, don't.

The rules will be identical except BBC regional news will return as an accepted QO. There's a very boring technical issue with the site that has held me up for about a month from doing anything important, which I won't dull you with. However, I think 2019 should see the end of "updates" in the traditional sense...

So which deaths right now would change the standings? Jose Jose, Fernando Ricksen or Marieke Vervoot (lol) would give BoB the lead. Tiffany Youngs or late pass obits for Cynthia Heimel or Ian Toothill would do for TJS. Greg Gilbert would give it to To Kill A Gabor Sister. I think that's it excluding unnatural deaths or Christmas Day carkings?

Stu Ungar flopped for good today in 1998

There is an older nun!