Smarter Sheep

Don’t download and install free screen savers…. yes I know.. they come with pretty waterfalls, flying geese and spectacular mountain scenes. But, they also install junk on your computer that sends all your internet browsing information back to some secret website on an island in a third world country where hackers are selling your information to feed their children. Yes, I know.. you want to help feed their children, it’s a great ministry idea…but us computer guys prefer you just send them a check rather than causing more computer work for us.

For those, like myself who didn’t attend or even know about the Google conference in may, I ran across a cool area that google has setup with videos and downloads of all the presentations. There is coverage for many of their applications as well as building apps on their new python based appengine. Check it out here

2:00 pm - just finished 2 days of work moving pages around in our Sitefinity based website. Performance was dead slow so it took much longer than it should have.

2:05 pm - testing all the pages in the website menu structure. Hmm.. none of the most important ones are working. I’m getting a generic error message that something failed in the framework.

2:10 pm - logging back in as admin. Can’t edit the pages either. Same generic error message. I’ve seen this before with the framework and I’m concerned.

2:15 pm - go to sitefinity website and login to get latest framework patch which i’ve been avoiding. Hope applying this will fix the issue.
2:20 pm - download completes, unzipping and getting ready to upload to site. Good thing I made a backup last week.
2:25 pm - Put up a website maintanance page and start uploading Sitefinity patch… nearly 3600 files…

3:01 pm - 1 cell call, 1 google chat and 1 text message from 3 different people that the main website was down. No maintanance page or anything just a big server error.

3:02 pm - panic
3:03 pm - @#$%$#
3:04 pm - time of repentance and healing (had to keep it short for obvious reasons)
3:05 pm - checking site, ftp into server, start checking logs
3:08 pm - no logs to be found, editing global.asax file and turn on custom logging feature I wrote for such an occasion.
3:12 pm - log into host account and resetting asp.net
3:20 pm - still no luck…so editing web.config to turn off any caching etc and checking settings
3:30 pm - locating backups
3:35 pm - modifying backup web.config
3:40 pm - short prayer
3:41 pm - ftp and upload 7500 files to restore website file structure from backup
3:44 pm - realize this is going to take awhile… more repentence
3:50 pm - opening more sockets in the ftp client..hey hey.. that helped … short praise time
4:01 pm - backup restored..
4:02 pm - site still not coming up
4:04 pm - log back into hosting server and remove and reapply .net.
4:08 pm - site comes up yeah!
4:10 pm - testing menus because something doesn’t look right. A large group of pages won’t come up without the generic application error message.
4:15 pm - log into admin interface on website
4:16 pm - admin interface errors out
4:17 pm - sinking feeling
4:18 pm - panic, prayer, repentance (I’ve almost got this down now)
4:20 pm - try several other routes to login and finally get in. I can navigate anywhere within admin interface except to the pages screen which is where I need to go to try and repair any of the pages. Same error message there that I get on all the failing pages.
4:30 pm - create a trouble ticket with hosting company to see if they have anything in their logs that may help.
5:00 pm - still working on admin interface but no luck, hosting company responds that their are no errors logged in IIS so it looks like it’s all in our Sitefinity framework.
5:15 pm - make descision that we are going to lose the last several days of work on the site and have to restore database backups.
5:18 pm - log support ticket with hosting company to restore last week’s backup.
6:35 pm - hosting company says they have it done.
6:40 pm - something is wrong. Doesn’t look like they restored anything. data is the same.

7:00 pm - 1:00 am working on other things while waing for hosting company to reply to my ticket that something is wrong with their restoration of the database.
1:00 am - 1:40 am - tickets back and forth with hosting company as they realize they were trying to restore wrong database on wrong domain…. scary! they have always been superb in the past… must be a new guy having a bad night as well.
2:15 am - database backup finally successfully restored.
2:30 am - main church website is finally up and running again, but without any of the recent changes so it looks like a “do over”
2:35 am - testing pages and logging in to admin interface of website framework
2:40 am - looks like all is well and we are back to where we started… except for our main xml files on the site rotator got nuked during all this and I have to recreate them.
3:00 am - testing in several different browsers and it looks like we are back online.
3:05 am - sigh of relief mixed with thoughts of having to redo all the work and how to do it without the framework corrupting our data again.
3:10 am - prayer and thanks to God for getting us through another day in the church IT department. I’ve learned long ago that things could be much worse

I found this great example on the Ask the CSS Guy website for slightly rounded corners on css styled buttons. There are no background images used at all to achieve the rounded corners. It’s all done in css using a few nested tags. The conversation in the resulting comments ultimately came up with a great way to do this using negative margins without any extra html tags.

Read more »

I have been toying with CodeIgnitor for the last couple of days and have to say that I like it so far. There is another fork of it that I will look at next. I am also spending some time with Scripalicious for ajax functionality to see what combination for php development will give us the best bang for the buck in terms of performance and resources needed to crank out applications in a hurry.

So far the following frameworks look interesting:

CakePHP
Zend
Code Igniter

More to come

Today’s Web 2.0 number is 2, two, dos.. the number 2 is a bright olive green color. The olive green I’m referring to is not a military sort of green, although it could easily go that way if 2 got angry and became militant. I picture 2 as more of a bright glassy olive tone. Your wondering why number 2 is in the green slot? It’s simple, really… number 2 is not number 1. We all know that number 1 is a forever gloating “hey I’m up here on top and your all not..look at me” kind of a color. Therefore, number 2 always feels like less of a number. Two works hard to stay well spirited and tries to glow as best he can… hence the Web 2.0 glassy, shiny-ness, but because he always feels a deep sense of being in second place, the envy show through…just a little… leaving him green.

In my new Web 2.0 series I would like to discuss the close relation between numbers and colors. I know there will be offenses made. So I would like to apologize in advance to those I will offend with my color choices. I would also like to alleviate any concern for the hexadecimal system by stating ahead of time that no colors were hurt during any of my testing.

Today I would like to start with the number 5, Five, cinco… 5 is a blue color. Not blue in the sense of sad, depressed or lonely… that would be more of a navy. I like to think of 5 as more of a blue in terms of corporate colors. Think blue as in Microsoft, IBM and blue ribbons on apple pies at the county fair. Blue as in, “wow her eyes sure light up when I come through the door”.

If you don’t agree with my assessment of the number 5, leave a comment and we can discuss it.

Technorati Tags: web 2.0, colors, numbers, internet

My name is xxxx and I am the president of a ladies corset company. My company is Christian owned and operates in Mount Clemens, MI. I know church fundraising can be challenging. My company offers a free Partnership Program to help churches raise funds. Churches that partner with us receive an individual church code. When a customer purchases from us using the church code, the partner church receives 10% of the total purchase. The church only needs to let their congregations and supporters know about our partnership, give them the church code, our website address and phone. We will do the rest. Please review our website at: xxxx If you are interested in a partnership, click on the Site Map link and go to Partnership Application Form. Fill it out and submit it. I look forward to helping your church continue to spread the Word.

Ok, so I can see our youth group out selling ladies corsets to raise money for summer camp can’t you? Imagine spreading the word as you go door to door sharing the gospel message and inviting unsuspecting seekers to visit the ladies corset website on their home computers… good grief…

I got an email from one of our IT volunteers this morning for Tiger Direct where they have a promotion going for 1GB Flash Drives at $3.99 each. As JP noted “As a technical person, this is a sad, sad day. Hopefully laptops will stay less than a gallon.”