Category Archives: News

News relating to ZX81.org.uk.

1000

According to WordPress, this is my one thousandth post here. I’m not sure how (or whether) I should celebrate this occasion but thought it was worth noting.

ZX81.org.uk has been around in one form or another since 1999. It’s survived the dot com boom and bust, it made it through the financial crisis and austerity. It’s been my “home” for longer than any physical location. It’s outlasted six employers (excluding myself, when I was self-employed) and I’ve had it longer than I’ve known my wife or had children.

Time constraints mean that I don’t post here as often as I used to so who knows how long the next thousand will take to write…?

Changes

A couple of minor “admin” changes:

  • If you want to get an email subscription, you can do so by using the “Subscribe to Blog via Email” option at the bottom of each page. Or, if you leave a comment, you can simply check the “Notify me of new posts by email” box. If you’re currently using the old system, please try to switch over to this new variant. Long story short: I can’t access the Feedburner service that I used to use
  • For the same reason, I have switched the RSS feed. It should point to http://www.zx81.org.uk/feed — indeed it may already do so — but please check and update if you use it
  • I’ve added “Share” links on many of the pages. Some sites are a bit too in-your-face, practically demanding that you share posts. I’ve tried to add the functionality without being too obnoxious. Having said that, please do share my posts!

Bah!

So there I was, trying to be a good Internet citizen. I updated my web server to use the latest version of Linux and… Boom! It would display the first post and then just peter out.

Unfortunately I don’t have the time or patience right now to track down exactly what the problem is — presumably something to do with PHP — so here you go: a new theme. It’s one of the ones I considered before I switched last time. A bit more minimal, more monochrome than last time. I like the minimal, and the lack of colour makes the pictures pop a bit more so it’s not all bad.

I just hadn’t planned on switching just yet…

Glitch…

I have just moved ZX81.org.uk to a new web server for reasons that are too dull to explain here. The good news is that it should be faster and, hopefully, more reliable than before. The bad news is that there are still a few things that I need to do before we’re 100% whole again.

The main gap is where you’d normally expect to see a picture you might see the word “photopress.” This is because a WordPress plugin that I used to use no longer works on my new server. I’ll gradually move everything over to… something that works. Unfortunately there is a deadline and there was no way that I was going to get everything ready in time.

Update 9 August 2011: I’ve partially (and temporarily) fixed the problem with the photopress plugin. I installed a newer version but my medium term plan is to move away from using a plugin to manage photographs.

Missing Pictures

If you’re seeing any pictures missing from ZX81.org.uk at the moment this is because of a glitch in the way that I synchronise my pictures from my computer to Flickr. In short a large number of images were removed and I’m having to go back, find out which pictures I’d used and update all the relevant blogs. Please let me know if you find one that I missed.

Web-host Whinge

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.