Tag Archives: Site-Admin

Redesign

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Taster of the new site theme - 01 June 07Another short note, the promised site redesign is under way – and hopefully nearly completed! The new theme should look quite similar to this screenshot here, notably with only a single sidebar, and ideally has taken on board most – if not all – of the feedback we have received.

If all goes well, the style will be changed before the weekend and we can settle down to more ranting about idiocy.

Thank you for your patience.

[tags]blog, compuskills, site-admin, webdesign, why-dont-you, whydontyou, wordpress[/tags]

Back Online

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This is a short note to say I am back online now. Things are still a little hectic so “normal service” is not yet in place, however at least I can use things other than my phone to browse the web – it has shocked me how reliant “we” become on the internet for basic things.

Anyway, thanks to the miracle of Pipex, I have a working net connection (four days, only two of which were “working days,” after I ordered online) and things are certainly brighter now. Well Done Pipex.

Now I am “back” as it were, I will have a look at re-designing the site theme to try and improve on the issues it currently has and take on board the user comments you were kind enough to send. Thank you.

More soon.

Offline

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This is a short post to let people know that Admin and myself will be off line now for a couple of weeks. Hopefully it wont be long before a functioning ISP / Net connection is re-established (will it be Sky? Will it be Pipex? Who knows but it bloody wont be Virgin Media!).

In the interim Heather will try to keep ranting about idiocy, bad science, bad philosophy and the like.

Bye bye for now…

New Style

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As you may see from the site, we have taken the plunge and gone for a whole new style here. This has been designed for us by Compuskills and as far as I am aware it will be made available for free download from the compuskills blog site in the very near future.

This theme has also been tweaked a little to try and address some of the issues this blog has been having lately. Hopefully you should now find the site faster and more responsive. If you have any questions or issues with this theme please let us know. We are genuinely interested if you have any problems with the navigation or find the style is broken in anyway.

Thank you for your patience.

[tags]Site Admin, Style, Themes, Compuskills, Blog, Blog Software, WordPress, Downloads[/tags]

2.2 Upgrade Completed

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As mentioned previously, we were intending to upgrade this site to WordPress 2.2. This upgrade has now been completed and everything seems to be running fine. If you encounter any problems or inconsistencies, please let us know.

Plugin Admin

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In a previous post, I wrote:

Secondly – I will be getting rid of some plugins and experimenting with new ones. Your feedback is welcome, if one annoys you or breaks your feedreader or what ever, then please tell us. I think the “Sphere It” plugin will have to go, as it looks like it is slowing down the pages by a considerable amount now.

Following that post (and it was only a few hours ago), I removed the plugin but it did not help speed things up with the site. Add to this a couple of comments made which drew my attention to the problem still being there and I have had a ruthless clean out of plugins.

It does seem like the “Sphere It” plugin was innocent but I have no removed so many other plug ins I am far from happy about saying it was any of them causing the problem. I removed ones like the popularity contest, the duplicate social bookmarking plugins and some obscure ones which rarely seem to have been used. In my testing here, the site is now loading in about 20 seconds so it seems to have cured the problem. I would appreciate it if people could let me know what they are getting (estimates and approximations are fine, it is what I used 🙂 ).

[tags]Admin, blog, Blog Software, Feedburner, Feeds, plugins, RSS, Site Admin, Sphere, Sphere It, Technology, Upgrade, Web Design, Why Dont You, WhyDontYou, WordPress[/tags]

Site Matters

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Just a few “site admin” comments to make, so I thought I would make them all in one post.

First off, WordPress 2.2 has been released. Normally we would follow the generic Compuskills advice and wait a while before upgrading but, following some off-line playing, it seems this blog could upgrade sooner rather than later. For this upgrade we will have to delete all the existing files and upload new ones, so there could be a period where this site becomes unavailable or unusable. As, recently, we have been having a fairly continuous run of traffic (around 360 visitors per day) there seems no “low traffic” time to do this. All I can offer is an in advance apology if you get funny page layouts and the like.

Secondly – I will be getting rid of some plugins and experimenting with new ones. Your feedback is welcome, if one annoys you or breaks your feedreader or what ever, then please tell us. I think the “Sphere It” plugin will have to go, as it looks like it is slowing down the pages by a considerable amount now.

Lastly, as I am about to move house there will be a significant interruption of service. Hopefully Heather will be able to hold the fort, but given VirginMedia’s abysmal service there is no guarantee. Please, feel free to continue to comment or email us. They will be read eventually.

On a related note, if any one is a Sky Broadband customer I would love to know what the service you have had is like and how reliable it is – also is the service really uncapped? (Sky Max). I have my doubts over the veracity of Sky when the broadband thing gives three options – Base (£40 set up, no monthly charge, 2MB bandwidth, 2GB cap), Mid (£20 set up, £5 per month, 8MB Bandwidth, 40GB cap) and Max (no set up, £10 per month, 16MB bandwidth, no cap) – all of which seem amazing value for money.

Worryingly, when I put in the telephone number for my current address, I am told the only broadband option is Sky Connect (not one of the above) which is 8MB bandwidth with a 40GB cap (looks suspiciously like “Mid” above) but this will incur a £40 set up fee and £17 per month. Why on Earth does it cost over three times as much as “Mid?” Does this imply Sky have headline services and rates (which are very good) but in reality customers can not get them? (Would this even be legal?)

Still, I will for a while give Sky the benefit of the doubt and consider it as an option- unlike Virgin Media which I would, now, only consider if it was free and uncapped…

[tags]Site Admin, Why Dont You, WhyDontYou, WordPress, Blog, Blog Software, Admin, Web Design, Broadband, Cable, VirginMedia, RSS, Feeds, Plugins, Feedburner, XML, Technology, Virgin Cable, Virgin Media, Internet, ISP, Upgrade, Sphere, Sphere It, [/tags]

Paying the price of stupidity

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Oh dear. I am really not having a good day today.

This site, and a few others I admin, is hosted on a Linux server and today I was SSH’d in doing some admin tasks. One of the advantages of it being on Linux is the crontab. Over the years, the crontab for this account has grown into a convoluted, long, interesting, useful but undocumented crontab. For non-*nix people, the crontab is a way of scheduling things and is great for setting up automated processes like backups, sitemap submissions and the like.

Today, I needed to copy a line out of the crontab and use it elsewhere. I logged on and tried to list the crontab. In my haste I typed:

crontab -;

(missing the “l” key by a few mm). Argh. This has had the unfortunate effect of killing the entire crontab. I could cry. I should kill myself as punishment for the sheer stupidity. Now when I send crontab -l, I get the dreaded “no crontab for [account name]” message as a response.

What a nightmare. I am stupid enough to have no backup of the data in the crontab, nor was it documented well enough to recreate it properly. I should be shot.

At the bare minimum, I hope this will act as a lesson, for myself if no one else, in the importance of documentation and backups.

[tags]idiot, linux, rant, site-admin, why-dont-you, whydontyou[/tags]

Technical Problems

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It seems Heathers problems with the crappy service from Virgin Media is not the only issue hitting this blog at the moment. Looking at the stats, it seems an awful lot of people are reading this blog via it’s feed rather than actually visiting the URL.

There seem to be two main options for people getting the feed. It either comes straight from the blogs feed (here) or from the feedburner feed. Recently, although the blogs feed has been working fine and includes all the latest posts, the feedburner one has been showing problems.

When I tried to investigate this, it seems that trying to connect to the blog feed from feedburner returns a server timeout error. This is not apparent why you try to access the feed direct, but also appears when you try to use feedvalidator to check the feed is valid. I find this really, really strange. Does any one have any ideas?

[tags]Technology, Feed, RSS, WhyDontYou, Why Dont You, Website, Site Admin, XML, Feedburner, Feedvalidator, Rants[/tags]

Side Admin

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A couple of asides for general information. First off, I have been working my way through emails lately and a few people have asked for a return to the “old” theme. While I suspect most of these people are Heather, I am sure not all are, and there are a few valid points made (apparently this theme breaks on IE6 or older, which makes up over a third of the visitors). As a result, while a bespoke theme is being worked upon, we will revert to the Fallseason theme of a few months ago. Personally, trying to settle on a “nice” theme which works for as many people seems a task which I will never, ever, manage.

Secondly, as mentioned the other day (“Not Many Posts“), there have been a few problems with Heather’s access. Virgin Media were supposed to send an engineer out today to fix it. As a sane person would have guessed, the engineer never turned up (an accident was to blame, no more details known) and now she needs to rearrange the visit. While accidents do happen, it is a shame that cost cutting measures by Virgin have meant that they had no slack in the system to work around this and it could be another week Heather goes without access. What great customer service…

Not Many Posts

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Very short one. Things have been quiet here for a while (especially when you look back at January / February’s post rate!) and this is likely to remain the case for another week or so – with occasional bursts of activity 🙂

As the moment, I am on the road quite a bit (this is being sent by the wonders of a hotel WiFi link and isn’t cheap!) and, as is becoming a regular occurance, Heather’s Virgin Media cable connection has died. Virgin have assured Heather they will be out to fix it by Tuesday (she reported it on Thursday) so things may improve.

All I can say is, especially as I am looking at a new ISP, the last one I would consider is Virgin media.

Site Admin

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As mentioned previously, we have added some new plugins here and it seems they have broken the theme quite badly. This leaves us with two choices, and as the theme itself has become a bit annoying (second thoughts over the sponsored links, for example), it seems it is time to try out a new theme. The last time we tried this, there were problems in the old versions of IE so I would appreciate it if people can let us know what you think of the layout of the site now.

In addition a “struggle” is ongoing (offline) against the CSS files but when it is won (and by Toutatis it will be WON), we will be moving (again) to a bespoke theme. Thank you for your patience.

New Plugins, New Theme

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Short, administrative, comment for now. We have added some new plugins (for example the “sphere” one you can see at the bottom of most posts) and will be trialling a new theme over the next few days. Please let us know what you think – your feedback is always welcome.

Site Theme

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As you may have noticed over the last few weeks, we have been trying out new themes for the blog (the joys of WordPress).

It looks like this is the one we are going to settle on, and it will remain in use for the next few days. Can you take a moment to let us know what you think please? Good and bad comments are welcome here.

Blog Problems

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There may be a dramatic reduction in the post rate to Why Dont You… Blog for a few days. We are suffering from some pretty major hardware problems and need a bit offline time to rectify this.

Hopefully things will be sorted in the very near future though and we will still occasionally blog as the rant takes us!