This is ZX81.org.uk » News

Web-host Whinge

Stephen Darlington — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 19:14:29 +0000

I normally try to be pretty positive here. Most reviews you’ll find here are of products that I’ve bought with my own money and that I’m broadly happy with.

That makes this post the exception.

You may remember that ZX81.org.uk went off-line for over twenty-four hours last month. Shortly afterwards I switched away from Adept Hosting, but it’s not only, as you might expect, because of the reliability.

I posted the following review at Review Centre:

When their systems are up and running everything was fine. Technical support tended to be accurate when a response was received.

That’s the good. But there’s way more “bad” to note. Their servers were not terribly reliable and tended to go down for extended periods of time without warning and with no mention on their support website. Worse, getting through to their technical support team was almost impossible. I have sent four messages so far about my domain name transfer and have not received any response or action so far. I may have to force through the change through Nominet which wipes out any savings that I obtained by using Adept in the first place.

In short: not recommended.

In Adepts favour they were cheap. Plus some of the things they were bad at — billing for example — worked in my favour.

Maybe that’s their problem, perhaps they’re too cheap. They should be able to support their customers. Their suggested response times are not great and they have, in my experience, consistently missed even those.

But whatever their excuse and however cheap they are it’s no longer good enough and I’ve gone elsewhere.

www.cut

Stephen Darlington — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 19:25:53 +0000

I try to keep ZX81.org.uk free of direct promotion of my iPhone applications but I think the launch of a new one warrants an exception to the rule.

www.cut Icon

www.cut is a utility that shortens URLs so that they can be mailed, Twittered or FaceBooked without worrying about character counts or line breaks.

Find out more at the above link or head straight to the App Store to download a copy. It’s free so you have nothing to lose!

New Host

Stephen Darlington — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 19:32:47 +0000

Welcome to ZX81.org.uk’s new host. It may look the same as the old one but will hopefully be more reliable!

If you missed the full story, here’s how I reported it on the old server:

If you came here a day or two ago you probably found that ZX81.org.uk was missing.

It turns out that this was not just an extended outage but a planned maintenance activity where they moved my account from one server to another.

Not that they told me — or their own server monitoring tool — about this.

This lack of communication meant that the linkage from the name to the actual server was broken and that no-one, myself included, could access it.

The link has now been restored and if you’re reading this is working correctly.

Hopefully the next change will be a little more seamless. Next change? Yes, frankly this was the final straw and I’m moving ZX81 to a new web host. Hopefully things will be a little more reliable from now on.

Welcome back

Stephen Darlington — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 12:39:59 +0000

You may have noticed that ZX81.org.uk has been offline for at least twenty-fours hours. I don’t know exactly how long, but I first noticed about this time yesterday.

At the moment I have no idea what happened. The company hosting the site have not been terribly forthcoming — no response to the support tickets I raised, no public announcement of the down time — which in a sense is even more disappointing that the downtime. No system is 100% reliable, but you should at least communicate with those most affected.

I am considering whether to move to a different provider (recommendations encouraged), but in the meantime I am hoping that things have returned to normal.

Welcome to 2008

Stephen Darlington — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 18:45:00 +0000

And welcome to the new look ZX81.org.uk! This time I decided to go “back to basics” with a relatively simple, low-graphics theme. Having said that, it’s not quite as basic as things were back in late 1999 when the site first went live¹. It’s less fussy than the old version and should load more quickly for those people not yet on broadband.

The boring details are: I’m using a slightly modified version of Dagon Design’s NightSky theme for WordPress. Other than a fairly extensive set of plugins, changes were to bring the theme in line for tags and to allow a daringfireball-style “linked list” rather than the rather more static del.ic.io.us list I had previously.

In theory I’m not missing anything that was present before but, as with any significant change, there is a chance that I missed something. Please let me know if you spot anything odd.

The Wayback machine only has an entry from August 2000, but the domain was first registered in November 1999 and a minimal placeholder was put up almost immediately.

WordPress 2.1 upgrade

Stephen Darlington — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 20:35:03 +0000

If you came to look at ZX81.org.uk a couple of hours ago you may have noticed that it wasn’t here. I’m pleased to announce that we’re back, and better than ever.

The reason for this outage was an upgrade. I generally find it easier to stay with the current version of WordPress but with the big jump to 2.1 I chickened out. Until this evening.

And, honestly, it wasn’t too tricky. I did a test upgrade on my laptop using the webserver and MySQL database in MAMP. I found that the template I use needed a quick update (as detailed on GFXedit) but otherwise the upgrade script seems to have done the job without any trouble. Please let me know if you do find anything wrong.

And the website vanishing? Entirely down to operator error I’m afraid. Need I mention the importance of regular backups?

So overall, a great job by the WordPress team — thanks guys — and a rather shoddy job by my clumsy fingers!

Spam, trackbacks and web statistics

Stephen Darlington — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 18:56:29 +0000

Some would say that it can only mean that I have far too much time on my hands. I claim that I’m merely interested. As is often the case, the truth maybe somewhere between the two. But the fact is, I do like to keep an eye how many people are visting ZX81.org.uk and what they’re looking at.

Tea Leaf, Sri Lanka

Sometimes people get here by the least obvious route. For example, most months I get a few hits from people searching for the words “my website.” What are they hoping to find? Are they expecting Google to figure out what they mean by “my”? Or is it just that there are an awful lot of very bored people just searching for random phrases?

There are also some oddities, I think anyway. My most popular picture is just of a tea leaf! (From when I was in the tea growing region of Sri Lanka.) It’s basically just a standard record shot, and even has a horizontal line across the middle where the lab scratched the negative. Not my greatest photograph. Some day I’ll invest the time to clean it up in Photoshop.

I figure I get a number of disappointed readers when they hop onto my site after searching for “Cuba girls.” I don’t know, maybe they are looking for girls chatting while leaning against a rusting old American car but somehow I suspect not. (This image from my time in Trinidad, Cuba.)

Girls chat in the street, Trinidad, Cuba

Most comments, it turns out, are not from “real” people at all. It was depressing to learn that most of my “readers” are just computer programs, and not very intelligent ones at that.

For a few months now I have been using the Akismet spam filter which has been doing an excellent job of removing such messages before you or I have to see them. I recently decided to bolster this with Paul Butler’s JS SpamBlock, which means that if you don’t have JavaScript enabled you may have to enter a random number when you post a comment. If you do have JavaScript enabled — and if you don’t know what I’m talking about you probably do — then everything should Just Work. In return I have seen my comment spam drop from around five thousand a month to virtually zero.

While I’m talking about changes you might see, I have also installed Imthiaz Rafiq’s WP-PDA which allows ZX81.org.uk to be readable on a PDA or smartphones web browser. Seems to work well from my phone.

RSS Feed Links

Stephen Darlington — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 11:21:49 +0000

If you’re subscribed to my RSS feeds you may well have noticed already, but I have started, as an experiment, adding interesting links to my del.icio.us account and syndicating them from here. Is that a good idea? What do you think?

If, on the other hand, that first paragraph made no sense, read on.

First, let me explain terms. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and is a way to get your web browser¹ to tell you when a website changes. If you have Internet Explorer 7 you should see the feeds icon (an orange square with white lines) next to the home icon on the top right, just below the search text box. In Safari the bar with the URL will have a blue RSS icon to the right. And Firefox has “Live Bookmarks” which do the same thing. Simply click the appropriate button and see what happens.

And if your browser does not support RSS — time you upgraded! — there are a couple of other ways of catching up. Look to the right of your screen and you’ll see buttons to add ZX81.org.uk to your “My Yahoo!” or to your Google Reader or Personalised Google Home Page. And, if that wasn’t enough, you can also subscribe by email².

If you do that you’ll see brief articles there that you won’t see here, where “here” is directly on the zx81.org.uk website.

And del.icio.us? That’s basically just a website where you can share interesting links with your friends. I’ve just made it easy by merging my bookmarks with the ZX81.org.uk RSS feed.

Yes, there are programs that do this specifically. And programs like Outlook can read RSS feeds too. However I think most people still use a browser.
Really, there’s no escape. You may as well give in now.

Switch Over

Stephen Darlington — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 13:46:04 +0000

The day has finally come. As previously discussed my other two websites are finally going away. Very shortly, links to darlingtonphotography.com and stephendarlington.com will no longer redirect here so please update any links you have. Pretty much all the content available on those sites is now here. A quick search should turn up something useful but let me know if something you liked has gone missing in action.

Consolidation

Stephen Darlington — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 11:20:52 +0000

As I mentioned previously, I am in the process of reducing the number of websites that I need to support. To that end, some time ago I moved the content from StephenDarlington.com to here with the intention of decommisioning the old site. That day is coming shortly. The actual domain isn’t going away for a while yet, but soon it will redirect to www.zx81.org.uk/blog/.

Similarly, DarlingtonPhotography.com is going to go away too, to be replaced by www.zx81.org.uk/photography/. In the next few weeks I will be transitioning the content, and shorly after that the site itself will vanish too.

Why am I doing this? Well, the short story is that it’s a pain having to maintain three distinct systems. It makes the most sense to stick to ZX81 as is already gets the most page impressions and has a bizarre mix of technology, opinion and travel photography. What difference is a few more pictures of people going to make?

Major Site Update