Archive for July, 2005

Time for a revamp!

By
Andy
 – July 29, 2005Posted in: Domains, Web Development

We´ve decided to give our online reminder system, Eppointments.co.uk, a bit of a redesign. The reason being after being live for a few months, we found that people are using it differently than we thought they would. They seem to be using it more for the texting facility than its email or contact management systems.
 
It´s also split up into professional and personal systems. We´ve had a fair few signups for professional but not for personal. We think its because it seems too complicated to use so we´re gonna split it up even further. The home page will simply be a series of links to the other areas, effectively sub-home pages for the different types of customer, such as Student reminders, Teen reminders and so on.
 
This means we can tailor each section to that market, streamline it and simplify the process as much as possible. We´re also gonna add features to make the process smooth but able to access the more advanced features if they want to.

 
We´re gonna add things like mobile number completion if they have the number stored as a contact, and eventually a predictive text system for the messages similar to that used in the T9 dictionaries used in mobiles. Time to do some research since I don´t fancy writing my own!

Viruses, Infections, Spyware, Trojans, Adware

By
Andy
 – July 28, 2005Posted in: Windows

Yup, V.I.S.T.A. That´s the new name for Longhorn when it ships next year (yeah, right). You´d think the Microsoft marketing boys would have been a bit more careful when thinking up the new name.

Nearly ready for the server move

By
Andy
 – July 27, 2005Posted in: Linux

After weeks of planning, massive reconfigurations, new backup scripts and file moves, I think I´m finally ready to move servers!
 
I´ve just to figure out a night when we should be fairly quiet to do the move so the sites aren´t down too long. I´ve got it all planned out and should be able to do it in stages so that I don´t have to do a series of all-nighters. Plus it is the holiday season so the distruption to the public should be minimal.
 

Just got to wait until Tuesday for a test script to run successfully and then I can go ahead and do it!

Do you need an search engine expert ot a web developer?

By
Andy
 – July 26, 2005Posted in: Web Development

I was looking at a job advert for a web developer (don´t worry boss, I´m not leaving it was just research) and one of the requirements was that the developer must have done at least one PR5 site or better.

 
Now what the hell has getting a good search engine ranking got to do with web development! Its supposed to be about things like sql queries, dynamic url control and manipulating 404 errors. As long as the developer takes into account things like search engines being about to spider the whole site, page titles and content and even friendly urls then I would have thought that getting a higher PR would be best left to someone with more experience in that area.
 
Oh, and before you all start leaving comments about how I talk crap, I don´t really care, I just like to rant when I´m hung over. Plus I do both anyway!

Phew! No more printer troubles

By
Andy
 – July 21, 2005Posted in: ADSL & Networking, Web Development, Windows

Our automatic invoicing system has been having problems recently due to the power cuts. The server has been downloading the PDFs and sending them to print but they were never getting printed out.
 
After investigating what was going on it became apparent that it was nothing to do with the network and internet being down while the power was off, but the delay in the Windoze print server booting up. Since the server sending the print jobs was on a UPS and doing it by sending "smb" commands to the windows server which were just getting lost as it wasn´t responding.
 
As a fix, I´ve now set it to run off a different printer that is a network printer with it´s own IP address. As far as queuing, the jobs get stored on the download server until the printer confirms the document is printed. That way we won´t loose any jobs and I won´t have to go through the database looking for invoices that should have been printed and haven´t.

Now Wannado is changing name!

By
Andy
 – July 19, 2005Posted in: ADSL & Networking

It used to be Freeserve, then they changes it to the French parent companies name of Wannado and now next year it will be changed again to Orange!
 
I´ve no idea whats going on with current users email addresses but I hope this is the last change as its starting to get confusing

CSS text-align: center in Firefox

By
Andy
 – July 18, 2005Posted in: Web Development

I was showing someone the website for The White Hart in Ashbourne that I´d knocked up when I had five minutes spare. Since he uses Firefox and this site uses more CSS than tables for layout, it was displaying the background image in the center where it should have been but the text was on the left side.
 

Turns out that Firefox does this if you specify text-align: center; in the body´s CSS styling. The easy fix those is to put all the body´s contents in a div and center align that.

Slightly off at a tangent

By
Andy
 – July 18, 2005Posted in: Uncategorized

We´re starting a new project at work to acompany our set of directory sites but as opposed to it being an online venture which is what we mainly do, this one is a magazine for local areas, e.g. The Spondon Rabbit for Spondon in Derby.

 
I like this project because there is very little to do on my part. I might have to upload a few adverts every month but thats easy, and the sites are pretty basic so creating new ones when we do more areas is easy too. For the first sites I was even lazier and got Sam, our GCSE work experience lad to do them for me.
 
Plus I get to be a journalist now as well. Since its locally based the stuff in there is mostly going to be about stuff going on in the community and so on, but we´re also going to some of the human interest stuff and I´m going to be writing a few articles along the lines of "How to keep your PC running smoothly" and "Avoid Internet Phishing scams". Should be interesting.

Printing problems? Thatll be the power cuts

By
Andy
 – July 14, 2005Posted in: ADSL & Networking, Linux

We´ve got a system that gets used for most of our online projects that allows companies to sign up for a service and then automatically creates a pdf invoice to send them. This then gets downloaded by the office server and then printed out once an hour.
 
We were going through the last days invoices and noticed that there was a big gap in invoice numbers. I checked the database and found that a load hadn´t been printed. This was probably because the power had been off so the download server was running but the print server was still turned off so they were just disappearing into nowhere.
 
Luckily we have another networked printer that I can use and if the download server can´t directly contact it, it will keep it in its print queue until it comes back up again. Sorted. Just got to make sure we don´t run out of toner or nothing´ll get printed until we get more.

Power cuts are annoying the shit out of me!

By
Andy
 – July 14, 2005Posted in: ADSL & Networking, Hardware

So thats now the third power cut we´ve had in the last few weeks and its really starting to piss me off! I don´t know whats going on with our power company but whatever they are doing doesn´t just cause a blackout but seems to be causing power surges as well that keep taking out the fuses on the power leads for my servers.
 

The most important one is hooked up to a UPS with surge protection so that always lives but I´m quickly running out of spare kettle leads for the others that keep dying. Plus as an added bonus, the internet keeps going down for no reason. I don´t think its our ISP because I keep seeing a BT van outside at the exchange when it happens.
 
This week just gets worse and worse…

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