Today and yesterday friends and readers have told me they’ve gone to the site and seen nothing — a blank page. Or they’ve gone to the site, seen the front page but gotten nothing when they click on a jump page. I noticed this myself early this morning while using Firefox and Google Chrome browsers, and occasionally with Safari. (I don’t use IE or Opera.)

I naturally took this up with the all-but-worthless, know-nothing techies at my appalling internet service provider known as Softlayer. I started a trouble ticket with them but it took hours to find a tech support person whose vocabulary and attitude indicated even a glimmer of intelligence and/or a willingness to try and solve the problem.

This is my fault, of course, because I didn’t ditch these guys last year. My life becomes a head-throbbing hell when this stuff happens. And it totally turns off the juices that need to flow in order to think and write articles.

I tried to enlist my regular tech-support guy but he’s got a full plate and a family and so on. About 25 minutes ago I finally found a very nice, intelligent-sounding Softlayer techie named Nicole who is now trying to figure out the coding problem that is causing the white-page Janusz Kaminski appearance.

The second splitting headache has been caused by Firefox. A bug in Firefox 17 (i.e., the current version) has retained the malware warning that was going up when I got attacked by a Kazakhstan trojan on 12.24. Hollywood Elsewhere is totally free of trojan infection — Google has issued a clean bill of health, the ad server where the infection was centered has been updated with the password changed, and the password to the guts of the site has also been changed — and yet Firefox is still warning people about nonexistent malware.

There’s no way to remedy this as long as Firefox 17 is current, but the situation will be fixed when Firefox 18 is made available sometime between January 6th and January 9th. So the Firefox malware flag will allegedly disappear when you go to Hollywood Elsewhere IF you start using Firefox 18 a week from now, but it will hang around if you stay with Firefox 17. Firefox 19 will be released on 2.19, it says here. Many thanks & Happy New Year, Firefox!