News
August 2, 2010
Sorry, everybody. My excellent webhost choose to advise me Thursday that they would be migrating my server Friday morning. They also assured me that the downtime would be minimal. They failed, however, to advise me that database connectivity would take several days to resolve, and that I would have to do it myself. My five emails for support have gone unanswered, so I managed to get the databases working again by creating new ones. Let me advise you that Netfirms is not a good company.
Because pretty much all of my sites depend on databases to some degree, all of them had problems. Some only failed to have content on some pages, while others couldn’t even load. My apologies to everyone affected.
February 26, 2010
So, a month ago I said things would be up and down over a few days. Well, it took a month, and the site probably flickered for a minute or two, but things seem fine. Finally, last night, I actually got around to moving to the new host and it seems generally seamless.
The cron jobs that I had running to deliver Twitter feeds are fully broken, and that was one of my main reasons for waiting. It may be another day or two before those are back up and running properly. But, all in all, the migration went smoothly and none of my sites are hosted by Externalgateway. It’s all over but the cryin’.
February 9, 2010
Good news! I’ve managed to complete the updates on the Smalltalk Photography website. Once the DNS changes (due to the dissolution of Externalgateway.com) propagate, the new site should be up and awesome!
January 29, 2010
Up all night to finish an addition to the PPF House website for a collection of music and art from artists all around the world in support of the Haiti earthquake relief effort.
This project has been put together to help raise support for earthquake victims through the relief efforts of Médecins Sans Frontières (aka Doctors Without Borders) whose work in Haiti has, over the past decade, included establishing an emergency obstetrics hospital, running the only functioning trauma centre in Port-au-Prince, and providing much needed treatment and support for victims of sexual violence.
www.msf.ca
www.ppfhouse.com/haiti
January 26, 2010
Back now from a very long break while I’ve been getting settled into my full-time work as a programmer at the University of Saskatchewan.
Some bad news today: effective February 28, 2010, Externalgateway.com is closing its doors. Sad, I know, but true. Our six-year experiment in website hosting, development, and design has come to an end. The margins on hosting are such that we can’t be competitive and still make it worth our while. A shame.
In any case, this site may be up and down over the next day or two and my email may be a little temperamental, but I’ll get everything moved over to a new host and let everything settle down.
September 18, 2009
Almost a month of apparently doing nothing? Not true. I’ve been learning jQuery to put together a fun photo gallery for Smalltalk Photography (I can’t believe I haven’t mentioned this website much). Most of the jQuery is for the administration interface, but it’ll also be for some navigation. I also whipped up a couple of multi-level list show/hide examples for a former colleague.
The big news is really that I’m accepting a job at the University today that will require me to tone down my web development and technical writing activities. Hopefully, I’ll still be blogging (which has decreased dramatically over the last few weeks). It’s a “programmer” position, but really means all-around tech dude, fixing printers, creating reports, assisting users and clients with software, writing documentation, &c. It’ll be fun.
I’m also putting the final touches on @SaskNews, a Twitter account for tweeting and retweeting Saskatchewan news. It will all be automatic, retweeting specific Saskatchewan-news Twitter accounts and tweeting from Saskatchewan-news RSS feeds. I was disappointed by the lack of Saskatchewan news Twitter accounts, and the lack of news that some of them posted, so I decided to aggregate the whole bunch.
August 26, 2009
New at the Web Developer’s Blog: Integrating social media into your application, part 2
August 25, 2009
Missed out on a cool opportunity to work on some web content scraping. Apparently, it would violate some license agreements. I guess that’s a good enough reason.
New at the Technical Writer Blog: How Poor In-house User Documents Cost you Twice & What to Do About It
August 24, 2009
New at the Web Developer’s Blog: Learning PHP
August 22, 2009
New at the Web Developer’s Blog: Integrating social media into your application, part 1
