Down time

Posted on by Ian C.

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 …

A different flavour of Fruit!

Posted on by Ian C.

Yes, it’s happened … goodbye Blackberry, hello Apple!

Blackberry and Apple phones

An early – and expensive – birthday present 😉

In some ways, I feel that the iPhone is a little like our MINIs … when I first heard about the iPhone I felt “interesting … but I don’t want one”
But then came the day when I actually saw one close up, and tried it – actually it was an iPod Touch, but similar – and using the web browser to visit GBMINI was a revelation! Look at how it renders the webpage exactly how it looks at home … look at how the text is readable even though it’s teeny tiny … and wow, it redraws wider if I turn the thing round, even easier to read 🙂
At that time, I had no idea about zooming, scrolling, etc – but it was so cool and it just seemed to work “right”. Once you’ve tried one, you don’t want to use a regular one any more – similar to how I feel with MINIs.

Margaret, also, is close to falling for an iPhone – although she’d never own a MINI. So I guess they’re not quite the same 😉

Anyway, to put this slightly “on topic” (do I have to do that for my own website):
I tried the iPhone in GBMINI#6 tonight – with the R50/R52/R53 factory iPod interface. The iPhone put up a message about not being compatible:

And yet, it actually played fine, working just like my regular iPod with the factory interface – which is, pressing CD6 to get any music (I haven’t bothered creating MINI1-5 playlists), and basically having no ability to navigate or see what’s playing.

You can press <> to navigate track by track (or 10 tracks at a time if you hold the buttons down), but with no way to know where you are, it’s best just to use random play mode.

Random play actually works better on the original factory iPod than on the R56 – in that pressing <> skips to the previous/next RANDOM track, but against that, the HU forgets that it’s in random play every time the car is turned off (or even if you just switch to radio).
Another plus of this factory solution over the R56 is that it continues where it left off after you turn the car off – but the negative here is that if you disconnect, then on re-connection it goes back to track 1. That’s a big pain in the iPhone, since you’re very likely to remove it from the car whenever you park.
Finally, you can’t look at the iPhone to see what’s playing, since it displays an unhelpful blank message, curiously though, you can still browse the web, check email – and presumably use the phone (but the wire’s not long enough – I’d have to put my head in the glovebox!)

Meanwhile, back in the land of iPhones – and following DB’s lead – I put the Content Robot iPhone WordPress plugin on to GBMINI … so now, my website displays quite differently on an iPhone to how it displays normally.
I can’t decide if I prefer the original “webby” layout, showing complete entries and pictures but very small text, or the iPhone custom layout which is much easier to read, but doesn’t show the whole page:

iPhone web page formats

Feedback, please 🙂

Google Analytics

Posted on by Ian C.

In case you don’t already know about it, Google Analytics is a free service that offers an amazing level of detail about access to your website, in an easy-to-use format. Here’s the “front page” of analysis for GBMINI, which I set up a week or two ago:

Josh Wardell introduced it to me (I think he’s been using it a long time), and I was impressed enough to try it immediately – you have to sign up at Google Analytics, add your website, then paste some supplied (Javascript) code in to every webpage, which is easy to do with WordPress since you can just modify the template header or footer.

Since it uses Javascript, it won’t work for people that have turned off such features in their browser – but it still gives impressive data, including average daily visits, most viewed pages, information on how visitors got to the page and where they went next, and location of the visitor (down to city detail for USA).

It’s intended for users of Google advertising features, and has loads of stuff I don’t use that helps figure whether people buy products or not! But for me, having an easy view of my websites is enough, and I love the price!