Archive for October 2006

I migrated our the last of our clients’ sites onto the new server this morning, so now that’s out of the way I hope to find the time to finish off World of Badger very, very soon ( as handy as this spell-check-as-you-type feature in Firefox 2 is, it’s not very self-aware - it’s offering me ‘Firebox’ and ‘Fire fox’).

Although work’s incredibly busy at the moment, Rob and I did take yesterday afternoon off to pop along to the Mac Expo at Olympia. There was definitely more of interest there this year, although admittedly of a personal rather than professional nature. Google had a big stand there, but as we have no particular interest in putting our content on Google Earth, we gave their presentation a miss. Also new this year was iStockPhoto; we had a brief chat with a photographer on their stand (she’s making money from it, which is good to hear, and was kind enough to let us have a pile of free credits) before went to have a play at the Wacom stand. My Wacom graphics tablet is 9 years old and showing its age, so I’m tempted to replace it (sadly I think the £255 Intuos3 A5 Wide is more realistic than the rather impressive Cintiq 21UX at £2116).

Last year’s ‘gadget of the show’ was definitely the Solio solar powered iPod/phone charger. This year two products stood out: the iTango dock and the GEAR4 BluEye.

The great thing about the iTango range of docks for iPods and nanos is that they’re designed to allow you to dock your iPod without removing it from any silicone or hard case you may have it in (Apple’s docks are too snug a fit). Arguably the curved iTango docks look nicer than Apple’s own, plus they let you store unneeded cable inside it. Unfortunately they were launching the iTango at the Expo, and didn’t actually have them on sale. Think the chap said they’d cost about £14 though.

The other product that caught our eye(s) was the GEAR4 BluEye, another gadget for iPods. It looks and works very much like the standard Apple iPod remote, but in addition to volume and playback controls, it features an FM radio and can be used to make and receive calls using your iPod, via a Bluetooth connection to your mobile. The remote has a built in microphone, and will pause your music when you make or receive a call. Caller ID is displayed on your iPod screen, as are recent numbers for when you want to make an outgoing call (or you can voice-dial). So, keep your phone in your pocket or bag, and not have to worry about missing any calls when you’re nodding along to the Best of Wings. Yours for about £50.

After the ‘all work and no play’ nature of the last month, I decided to treat myself to an 8 gig iPod nano. Bloomin’ lovely it is too. I actually bought it from John Lewis rather than Apple, having stumbled across Hot UK Deals’s voucher and discount codes page (yes, I know it sounds like the sort of site which is one notch up from Viagra on the spam-o-meter, but it is worth bookmarking), which got me £15 off my purchase over £75 thanks to a Telegraph promotion.

Naturally half of my weekend was taken up with deciding what to put on the nano; initially I planned only to put on things I’d listened to in the last year, but I kept uncovering CDs I’d completely forgotten about or just not bothered listening to for a few years (e.g. Lou Reed - Transformer, My Bloody Valentine - Isn’t Anything). Now a stroll to the shops is an exciting voyage of rediscovery and reunions.

I am already starting to wonder whether putting My Way - The Best of Frank Sinatra on there was a mistake though, as I keep finding myself singing along without realising. OK at home, but walking down Regent’s Street yesterday I must have sounded like some sort of deranged care in the community karaoke crooner.

In case you’re wondering why things have gone quiet again, it’s because I’ve been working on the new look for the site on my local server. The layout and typography is pretty much done, but I’ve not quite decided on the colour scheme yet. A similar green to the previous look is a strong contender, as is dark blue/grey. Any preferences?

The next step, moving World of Badger to the new server, went without a hitch (well, apart from the 20 minute period this morning between changing the nameservers and remembering to actually run the SQL to populate the new database with the old content!). As for the problem of Wordpress incorrectly showing zero posts under some categories, that was easily fixed by re-saving a single post from each miscalculated category.

The only other major issue I’ve yet to deal with is Bad Behavior; don’t get me wrong, it seems to be doing a sterling job of blocking spam (over 2000 attempts blocked in the last 48 hours), but unfortunately it doesn’t like my ISP NTL. Or more accurately, Distributed Sender Blackhole List (one of the spam IP address lists it uses) doesn’t like NTL’s transparent proxies, some of which are blacklisted.

NTL infamously routes all its customers’ web traffic through transparent proxies which cache content in order to reduce network congestion (in a similar way viewed pages being cached by your browser). There are a couple of dozen NTL proxy servers around the country, with their own IP addresses (as far as I know, the only other UK ISP to do this is AOL, and I believe they even use proxies in the US). Unfortunately, rather than checking my actual IP address against the blacklist, Bad Behavior is checking the IP address of the particular NTL proxy I happen to be being routed through. Even though the proxy can be shared with thousands of other users, all it takes is one person doing something bad (sending spam, or just having a PC infected with malware) for that proxy’s IP address to get blacklisted. That’s the situation with the NTL proxy at Bromley (my default) - because it’s blacklisted, all the NTL customers using it are effectively blacklisted too.

As a result of Bad Behavior thinking my IP address is blacklisted, I can’t actually log in to my own Wordpress admin area when connected through this proxy! (I’m blocked from other sites too, such as the ever-helpful DNS Stuff). Luckily there is a short-term solution - it’s easy to change to a different proxy (see here for more help and information on NTL’s crap proxies). Connecting through a non-blacklisted proxy in Cardiff means Bad Behavior allows me through.

Long-term this isn’t a solution though - obviously any visitors using blocked NTL proxies won’t want to switch just to post a comment. Bad Behavior dos have a ‘whitelist’ facility for listing IP addresses to let through, so I suppose I could enter NTL’s proxy IP address ranges. Perhaps a better option would be to tweak the plugin so it grabs the visitor’s real IP address and not that of the proxy server (I may have a go if I have time). Better still would be for NTL to stop using transparent proxies, but I guess if they’ve over-sold their services that won’t be happening any time soon.

Please excuse the plain Jane look. I’ve switched from b2evolution to Wordpress, and won’t be jazzing up the default look until I move the site to a new server (same URL though - see below). There will inevitably be a few broken links (I suspect the RSS link is different) but hopefully not too many. I’ll turn commenting back on once I’ve got sufficient anti-spam precautions in place I’ve now got the akismet and Bad Behavior plugins running, so commenting is back on - please let me know if anything seems horribly broken.

Well, don’t want to speak to soon, but the migration from b2evolution 0.92 to Wordpress 2.0.4 seems to have gone smoothly (apart from the categories not showing the correct number of posts - there are actually 532 posts in 8 cats, not 240 posts in 3 cats as it’s reporting - but they are still there). In case it proves helpful to anyone else considering switching, I’ll outline the procedure:

1. Download this conversion script and rename it to .php rather than .php.txt
2. Take a backup of your b2evolution database, just in case (if you’re on Windows, SQLyog is a good, free program for working with MySQL databases).
3. Download the latest version of Wordpress and upload it to your site using your FTP program. You don’t have to delete the b2evolution files yet. You will have to overwrite the existing index.php file with the one from Wordpress though.
4. Make sure you know the connection details for you b2evolution database - if you’re not sure, you can find the information in the _config.php file of your b2evolution install (in the conf folder).
5. Fire up your browser and go to [www.yousite.com]/wp-admin/install.php. Run through the normal Wordpress install procedure, but make sure you enter the same database details you use for b2evolution (including the database name). This will create the required Wordpress tables alongside your exisiting b2evolution tables in the one database.
6. Upload import-b2evolution-wp2.php to your site, in the wp-admin folder, and fire it up in your browser: [www.yoursite.com]/wp-admin/import-b2evolution-wp2.php. Follow the instructions, making sure to enter the same database details from the last step. You should hopefully see a success message, in which case your b2evolution posts, comments, links, users etc. will have been copied into the Wordpress tables.
7. Remember to delete the install.php and import-b2evolution-wp2.php files in the wp-admin folder. Now go to your blog’s home page, and you should see the default Wordpress install, populated with your posts from b2evolution.
8. If this has worked, you can safely delete your b2evolution files (be careful not to delete any files you might want to keep, such as those in your media or skins folders) and delete any database tables prefixed with evo_ (but don’t delete any prefixed with wp_).
9. Permalinks. Obviously you don’t want to break the links to your old posts, which were probably in the format /year/month/day/post_title in b2evolution. If you turn on date and name based permalinks in Wordpress, you’ll find spaces replaced with dashes rather than underscores in links for new posts. However, your old posts will still work even though they use underscores. Sweet.

Hope that helps.

For once I actually have a decent excuse for not having posted lately — work has been completely hectic, and to be honest I’ve felt totally drained.

A couple of weeks ago, in the early hours of the morning, there was a big power outage at the data centre that’s home to our main server (and this site). Unfortunately, rather than the UPS taking over until the backup generator kicked in, something fried/died, and it took the hosting company — DSVR — nine hours to get everything up and running again.

Even once DSVR had got all the servers back online, web and FTP were crawling, and mail was totally dead (something on the internal system was utterly screwed, quite possibly related to DNS).

The problem meant that not only were we without our main email accounts for the best part of two days, but so were over a dozen of our clients. As you can imagine, this didn’t go down too well, and when we weren’t sat watching the queue of emails growing in Exim, we were trying to placate clients.

Luckily we have our .com domain mail server hosted on a completely different server, for contingencies such as this, so at least we had some way of getting emails out. Nevertheless, it took until after the weekend for the backlog of emails to clear from our main server.

It wasn’t always like this with DSVR; when we signed up with them some years ago, we chose them because they had what turned out to be a well-deserved reputation for excellent service. Yes, they were more expensive than some, but the good up-time, versatility and great support was well worth the money. Support tickets were answered quickly, and the staff took an active role in discussions on the customer forums.

On the rare occasions when there was a problem with the service, DSVR’s status page would contain detailed explanations of the problem, and the steps being taken to rectify it and ensure it didn’t re-occur. The support staff would also happily discuss the problem in the forums, often with a refreshing honesty.

Sadly DSVR were bought by Legend Communications (formerly Business Serve, subsequently bought by Thus) in 2004, and the service has been going downhill ever since. Earlier this year there were big problems when they moved data centres, and despite lots of promised improvements, things just seem to be going from bad to worse. There aren’t any of the original DSVR staff left either.

Leaving aside the point that a power outage shouldn’t be able to screw up the servers for a couple of days, to add insult to injury the communication from DSVR/Legend/Thus has been almost non-existent. Little more than “Blah, blah, power outage, some customers experiencing problems with email, engineers working to restore service as soon as possible” on the status page for a couple of days. Certainly nothing like a decent explanation.

Rumour has it, because Legend/Thus are a PLC, any communication (including the status page) has to ‘go upstairs’ for approval by management in case if impacts on share price. Hoorah for capitalism!

Legend weren’t any more forthcoming when the Register reported on the problems:

They gave us a standard “we apologise for the inconvenience”-type response which, after days of their customers losing business, is unlikely to smooth relations.

They added that the email issues were caused by high volumes of traffic. Now, we’re not systems engineers lads, but we thought your business was all about dealing with high volumes of traffic.

Indeed. Except that the email issues weren’t caused by high volumes of traffic, they were a symptom of it. The problems seem to be related to their DNS system getting hosed, which is pretty worrying.

Sadly this is the large bundle of straw that’s broken the camel’s back, and we’ve decided not to renew our contract with DSVR at the end of October. It’s a real shame, but with the unreliability of DSVR’s service reflecting badly on us to our clients, our loyalty has been stretched to its limit.

So we’ve now started migrating our clients to our new server, which means lots of extra work — moving databases and domains, changing secure certificates, getting new IP addresses, updating payment gateways etc.. We’ve been pretty snowed-under with work lately anyway, so the extra hassle of moving servers is something we need like a hole in the head (we haven’t had a weekend off for a few weeks now). Anyway, enough self-pity….

I was planning on switching from b2evolution to Wordpress soon anyway, so the move to the new server seems like as good a time as any to convert. I haven’t yet finished the new look for World of Badger, which does mean I might have to go with the default Wordpress look until I’m less exhausted. Do not be alarmed though, the drabness won’t be permanent.