It seams like every time I set up some new advertising something on the server knows and decides to throw a wobbly. I recently set up two new adverts for BookSwap.ws and as I submitted them, the server decided to fall over. Before you even think it, they hadnt even gone live, so it wasnt due to a sudden rush of traffic!
Fortunately the host providers did a great job of detecting an issue and sorting it out without me having to do anything, apparently there was a network issue that caused the server to fall over and resist attempts at rebooting. This appears now to be fixed.
As I write this and logged into my EV1 Servers account I see an announcement of some outages apparently caused by a linux worm exploiting a php issue. I guess this is probably what happened to my server.
Then the day after that, one of the configuration files for BookSwap.ws web server appears to have been corrupted which caused the default server page to be loaded as if the site was off line.
I do wonder if this was caused by an issue with automated backups because it only happened to one site on that server, the one I had a few hours before configured automated backups for!, or, perhaps it was just because it was Friday 13th.
I dont usually run the automated backups provided by the web server application as this takes the site off line and is a real pain to configure - everything about the site is data driven so the database gets backed up regularly to a different server and the rest is code that doesnt need backing up anyway.
Apologies to anybody effected by the recent server problems, hopefully these are now sorted out, I will be keeping a close eye on the situation.
As youve probably noticed Im not all that good at posting, you have to wonder why when this short entry has taken me about three hours, and with some of its original content missing, mind you, it nearly didnt get posted at all.
All I wanted to do was paste some simple text into the word processor Im using (no prizes for guessing which famous one Im using!). Because the text was from a certain web browser the word processor decided to connect to the internet why I dont know, so I naturally blocked it when Zone Alarm told me it was accessing the internet. So that locked it up for ages, I was hoping it would time out, but an hour latter I had to end task it, fortunately the auto save had saved much of my work, but I had still lost more than I wanted.
I have to say I really hate the way paste works in most of the Office product now days, all I wanted was a simple bit of text, no formatting etc, I wanted the data with MY format, not the format from the web page, Ahhh and dont get me started about the way a certain spreadsheet handles cut/copy and paste, when I copy something I want it to stay on the clipboard - its almost as bad as its graphs, come back Q-Pro all is forgiven well, I actually liked that app so not to much to forgive!.
Being the webmaster of a book site I decided I should share what Im currently reading with you in my posts.
At present I am reading Vincent Maraias The Build Master, Im only about 2-3 chapters in, although I have cheated a little and read a few bits at random. Basically its about the Windows NT build team at Microsoft, its very interesting and I would certainly recommend it, especially if you are remotely involved in the build process for software products, managing source code or managing a software department. Being dyslexic I really have to like a book to keep reading it and this is certainly one of those, who knows, when I finally finish it I may well write some more about it dont hold your breath though as Im a very slow reader.
Steve.
Well I really managed to do it again didnt I, forgetting to add bits to the old blog. I cant believe its been 2 months since I last wrote.
I started this blog to give customers an incite into what I was up to with the various web sites and I had also read that it was a good marketing tool to help promote the web sites, so I guess Im failing miserable with these so far!
Last time I wrote I mentioned a lack of snow here in Cambridge, well as it turns out blogs are more powerful than I ever imagined, the very next day the best covering of snow Ive seen here in the UK for quite some time, it must have been at least an inch thick!!!.
Now Im thinking that if blogs are really this powerfully perhaps its about time I started complaining about my lack of wining lottery tickets! although I guess really not buying a lottery ticket in the first place doesnt help the matter.
Big apologies to all of you how make use of Dollars2Pounds.com (and the other exchange rates sites), the federal reserve who I get the currency feed from kindly changed the data format in the xml file at the beginning of April, how nice!, they didnt even bother to update the URI or anything to keep backwards compatibility, just a new format.
Well after some major stupidity on my behalf (requesting the rates for the next day) I finally managed to update the xml parsing routines to work with the new file format. Its times like that I wish I was using asp.net or PHP5, but for now my servers running PHP4, one day soon Ill be getting a Windows Server 2003 server and getting ASP.NET running for my sites, C#/.NET is a very nice language to write in and really improves developer performance however with the way things are Ill be needing 40hour days and a time machine to even get started with that.
In good news I managed to get some updates to the way each site gets the exchange rates, the way they worked was left over from the days on shared hosting accounts when I couldnt get all the sites to access a single database to store the rates in, thats now fixed and sites like Pounds2Euro.com should be somewhat faster now.
Also, if you use the Bango numbers to access either Dollars2Pounds.com or BookSwap.ws please not that these are no longer supported.