arkitrave :: log

Welcome to visitors from A List Apart. theplanet had a massive outage this morning, and several of TextDrive’s servers were down. The site and email have been down all day. Apologies for the outage, and if you tried to send me email, please resend it; my last message arrived at 4:11am this morning.

What I will say is this: TextDrive knows how to handle an outage. The community forum has had updates throughout the day. This is the first time I’ve ever had a host communicate with their customers throughout an outage, and was the main reason I left bluedomino recently.

Thanks to the TextDrive folks for doing their best to keep us informed throughout an outage, and again, please resend any email sent after 4:11am today.

Our article “Hybrid CSS Dropdowns” has been published in A List Apart, an online magazine “for people who make websites.” The article explains a technique for creating horizontal navigation that is easy to use and maintain. The editors say, “It’s a tasty little vitamin pill, so quit sighing and try it.”

I have finally found a host I’m going to stay with. I was with catalog.com for just longer than the 30-day cancellation period, and less than two months. I am now at TextDrive, paying a litte more, and getting a lot more for my money. catalog.com is good for simple, small sites that don’t need a lot of control or features, but it was not a good move for my site.

Since Apache makes it so easy, I’ve been serving html files as php for a long time, for several reasons:

• no specific technology needs to be hardcoded into the site url structure. Links will never break, even if I change to an alternative dynamic technology. I’m sure you’ve visited a newspaper site that’s gone from .php to .asp and you have to start all over with their search tool to find your article.
• the technology I’m using to generate my pages isn’t obvious to the visitor, as the url will always be an html extension. This isn’t really a security help, but it makes me feel better anyway. “html” says “website” to people, while “php” is confusing to non-tech folks.
• I can decide to script any page on the site without having to change its extension from .html to .php

Whether these are great reasons or not, it’s a functionality I’ve gotten used to, and since catalog.com allowed me to edit my .htaccess file, I figured I wouldn’t have any problem. And I didn’t, for over a month, until they switched servers and stopped allowing the rewriting. Of course, my site was broken for several days, trying to save files to disk with the IE warning “Some files may harm your computer”. Since this isn’t good for business, I have said goodbye to the nice catalog.com people.

TextDrive, fyi, defaults to parsing .html files as .php, so I guess I’m not the only one who does this. I am now a happy hosting customer again, and will begin my fight to get a refund from catalog.com, since I’m outside of the 30-day money-back guarantee period.

Wish me luck.

This log is the only thing working on my site currently.

Something that my new host did in the last couple days has caused my static files to be saved to disk, rather than downloaded to the browser. I have my .html files parsed as .php, to allow me to script in a few small things here and there. I haven’t touched my .htaccess file in two weeks, but somehow things just stopped working a day or two ago. I’m pretty sure it’s not a problem on my end. Probably something Apache-related.

So, apologies if anyone’s trying to access the rest of the site; I have a ticket open with the host and hopefully things will be resolved soon.

I’m sitting at Starbucks, without an internet connection. I don’t often sit at Starbucks, but I wanted a Chantico. However, as I’ve discovered the one or two places around town that offer free wireless internet, I have less and less reason to come to Starbucks, and my cafe loyalty has begun to be based solely on whether I can get online while I’m eating my sandwich and sipping my cappuccino.

I’m asking two questions. First, why does Starbucks continue to operate this scam deal with T-Mobile whereby I would pay more than my home DSL connection just to get online during the small portion of the day I am at Starbucks? Wireless internet DOESN’T COST THAT MUCH.

Secondly, why don’t more cafes get on the bandwagon and begin to offer wifi? My choices are very limited, and I’m getting sick of the sandwiches at my current hangout. I know there are some equipment costs in the beginning, but maintaining an on-site wireless access point involves one broadband connection, which in Buffalo costs between $30 and $60, depending on the type of connection and the provider. For a halfway successful coffee shop, this isn’t a lot to pony up, considering the extra coffee and food I would buy. And I’m just one customer.

The problem is that there are larger companies that are trying to be the T-Mobile to smaller cafes’ Starbucks. They, too, charge something outrageous like $6 an hour or $25 to $35 a month, and the only benefit to the cafe is that they handle the connection and billing. While lining their pockets. If I bought into all this, I could be paying $100 a month to get internet access at a couple local cafes and Starbucks. It reminds me of paying for internet access by the minute back in 1994.

The demand for this kind of environment is growing. I can’t work at home very easily, and I don’t have an office. So I’m a walking portable office, willing to bring my laptop and money to anyplace that is accommodating and has good food.

What we need is some knowledge in the business community that setting up such a service isn’t that hard, and there is no need to charge a customer $30 a month for something that is going to be on the level of restroom access in a few years. They may have pay toilets in Paris, but we don’t do that here, and internet access needs to become an amenity that is absorbed by the business and passed along to me in a few cent a drink cost increase, not a high-priced luxury good that causes me to bring my business elsewhere.

We are pleased to announce the launch of two new sites. LaseOptics Corporation is a local manufacturer of laser products such as counterfeit detectors, and Focus Massage and Myotherapy is a small massage studio in Olympia, Washington.

cvs.com, the online presence for one of the largest drugstore chains in the country, won’t let me in.

I’m using Opera for browsing right now, and though I have Safari and it appears to get past the browser sniffing dogs, I will move on to another drugstore’s site anyway. In fact, their browser sniffer is so good that Opera identifying itself as Netscape or IE still is blocked. As far as I can tell, there’s nothing on the site that would be dangerous to Opera. It’s ugly table markup, but it’s nothing Opera can’t handle.

Their upgrade message reads as follows:

We recently upgraded the architecture on our Web site to make it easier for you to use and to allow for more secure purchases. These changes also allow us to begin developing new functionality and viewing options. Even with these technical improvements, CVS.com remains compatible with the majority of browsers and platforms that are currently used.

Our site is currently optimized to these browser types and above:

If you currently use Netscape Navigator, click here to update it to version 4.5 or newer on a PC or Macintosh computer.

If your browser is Internet Explorer, click here to update it to version 5.0 or newer on a PC or Macintosh computer.

Upgrading your browser doesn’t cost you anything, and it provides you with these key advantages:

Significant improvement in your Web browsing experience using cascading style sheets

Highest security available for credit card transactions (a current Security Certificate will accompany the browser upgrade)

CVS.com is committed to your satisfaction, and we want you to have a pleasant and secure shopping experience with us. We sincerely regret any inconvenience that this situation may have caused. Your interest in our site is appreciated.

Thank you for visiting!

This sounds like an advertisement for browsehappy.com, not an encouragement to download Netscape 4.7 or IE 5!

The irony of it all is the promise of Cascading Style Sheet support. Wait, who invented CSS?

The migration to WordPress 1.5 should be about complete now. I was having a problem with the entire comments include not being included [thanks, Erik, for pointing this out to me!], and CSS issues due to relative rather than absolute URLs in my @import statement. These problems are both fixed now.

So, for the hordes of fans who wanted to comment on the Zen Garden publication entry, I’m sorry it wasn’t working.

Kate has also drawn my attention to remaining Internet Explorer issues. I just flat out don’t support IE5. It’s my site, and it’s just not worth it. However, IE6, on only the log portion of the site, has what seems to be an IE5 problem, increasing the width of the white content area. I don’t understand, as I don’t have a xml declaration at the top, and the entire site is XHTML Transitional. So, perhaps there’s another cause.

In other news, two new site launches will be happening soon.