Website/Hosting

As you may know, this website is powered by WordPress; I used to use MovableType but WordPress is much more flexible, and less complicated. I know many other MINI bloggers also use WordPress – so it must be a good choice 🙂

A while back, WordPress released v2.5 (then v2.6), basically insisting that people upgrade – so I did move over to it … and HATED IT! The new layouts, etc, were simply not very user-friendly; here for example is a screenshot of the front admin page (“dashboard”):

You can see that there’s a big area at the top (“Right Now”) given to stats (how many posts / comments / etc), and below that some details on recent comments and incoming links; the most important thing – “Write A New Post” – is tucked on the end of a title bar, right next to “Write A New Page” which I hardly ever use – it’s easy to hit the wrong one if you’re not paying attention! There’s also a lot of blank space on the screen …

These sort of changes carry throughout the admin pages, and I found this new layout significantly worse to use than the v2.3 layout – so much so, that I kept my websites running on the earlier version:

The v2.3 version is just a little simpler to work with – for example the first thing you see on the “dashboard” is “Write A Post”, which is what you want, and there’s an “Edit” link next to each comment (on v2.6 there’s no way to edit a comment from the “dashboard” and even in the comments page, you have to realize that to edit a comment, you should click the author’s name!)

 

Apparently, many other WordPress users were similarly unimpressed, and a usability study was commissioned (which makes fascinating reading!)
The result, was a massive redesign, which is now available as a Beta test – so I tried it on a new (free hosting!) account (don’t put a Beta on your main site, in case it breaks!)
I am blown away by how good the v2.7 redesign is / will be!

The v2.7 “dashboard” is fully customisable, so you can omit the stuff you don’t care about – and all the useful stuff has been improved to make it work properly (for example, you can now see comment text right there, and edit or delete it immediately); there’s even a new “QuickPress” feature to get something short and sweet published right away with no page navigation needed …

I’m looking forwarded to updating all my sites to this new WordPress version, just as soon as it gets officially released 🙂

I was checking my (many!) registered domain names earlier today (including grabbing another one for $6/year to prevent it being poached), and I noticed that 1and1 still maintains the customer data I had when gbmini was hosted by them!

Of course, most of the links will go to (this) current website, but if you manually go to the old weblog you see the last post about the first MCSa at MINI of Peabody – this was back when I was driving Indi Blue GBMINI#2, before GBMINI#3 was ordered and of course way before my current MINIs were built!

It’s funny to see this data still sitting in 1and1’s servers, when I now only use them for domain registration … I wonder if I could use the storage there?!

I guess nothing is perfect 😦

Last year I switched to Westhost to avoid the horrendous poor quality of Site5; I accepted paying much more per month to get quality – to quote from the website:
At WestHost we pride ourselves in maintaining not only a fast but RELIABLE connection
– Multiple redundant telecommunications paths and carriers
– Numerous secondary power solutions in case of emergencies
– RAID mirroring
– 24/7 monitoring, backups and security updates
24 hours a day, 7 days a week via toll free phone, instant live chat and rapid response e-mail

And typically they’ve been pretty good. They’re not particularly fast at serving WordPress pages – even though I have a VPS plan set up for re-sellers, and allocate the resources to only my few websites. But they do normally respond fast if there is an issue, and give me confidence.

Well last night, my websites went down. Visiting the support pages I found a message saying there had been a power outage and some sites might be affected. A power outage?! Isn’t that one of the things that any hosting company should be able to guard against?
After a while all my sites came back up, except GBMINI – I couldn’t access the management page either so I was stuck. I sent a support email, got a boiler plate response, but no more (generally within ten minutes any issue I email about is sorted).
A couple hours later GBMINI was still down; I tried online chat which gave a real person response, but they said “we’re busy, please wait” and seeing it was bed time, I didn’t.

Now of course, we’re up once more – although websitepulse says we were down more than six hours. I guess that’s not so bad if it doesn’t happen for another year …

UPDATE:
Turns out the Gallery v2 SQL database was trashed as well!
Thankfully I have backups, and had to re-post only one picture …