Archive for the ‘Websites’ Category

Is there anything more annoying than when you type out a long message to someone on Facebook, click send, it disables the text editor so you can’t edit or even select and copy the text you’ve just written - and then the AJAX request fails and you loose your message.

Obviously that is a rhetorical question. Siblings, the itching of chickenpox and Big Brother are just a number of the many, many items more annoying than that. But I don’t feel such towering feets of annoyance really detract from quite how annoying it is when that happens on Facebook.

But no more! With my Web Developer add-on I just simply select forms from the toolbar and then click “enable form fields” to have all disabled elements enabled once again. Chew on that one Mark Zuckerberg :D.

Having been backward compatibility testing my Web 2.0 apps without JavaScript I have several times now forgotten to turn JavaScript back on before heading off to browse some other websites. It’s interesting to see which websites work and which don’t.

Facebook is the notable website I have spent the most time on and it’s a fairly mixed bag. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t. For instance you can poke someone back without JavaScript but you cannot accept or reject requests without it. Netvibes (rightfully so probably) didn’t work at all without JavaScript. WordPress seemed to work fine for the most part though I didn’t do anything other than start typing this post.

Which led me on to thinking, will we reach a point where you need JavaScript? Whether or not you agree with the increased use of JavaScript on the web (aka Web 2.0 really, and don’t get me wrong, I do agree with it, that is just my token comment to keep Mr. O’Shea happy :p), it is happening. The question is, how far will it go? How long will people keep writing code backward compatible with non-JavaScript? Indefinitely or have they already stopped doing it? Something to think about.

As we all know, Facebook is on the way down. It’s bad enough that they now allow non-university students to use the sites but now with all these pointless applications (as well as now having the types of users that will use and spread them) which people constantly send you requests for and putting a million different boxes on a user’s profile so you have to scroll for 30 minutes to reach their wall, how much better is Facebook than MySpace?

Well, still quite a lot better. But the gap is closing. I was using MySpace today (viral marketing, it’s still the biggest social network in the world) and they have really been working on it. The layout is good, the functionality works. It’s a huge improvement on what it would have been like a year ago.

I was uploading some videos to Revver today to find that they now review every video manually! Every single video is apparently now moderated by a Revver staff member to ensure that it doesn’t violate copyright (among other reasons).

Meanwhile in YouTube’s fight against copyright they had now banned any videos longer than 10 minutes long, no matter what account you have (previous you could sign up for a director’s account which required a few extra contact details to get the limits increased).

An email recently arrived in the inbox of registered users of Pandora from the UK informing them that Pandora will be switching off to UK users on January 15th.

It’s a real shame as Pandora is a fantastic service. For those who haven’t discovered it yet (and I wouldn’t advice trying it now as you’re only going to get into it as they start blocking us), basically you put in your favourite song or artist and it goes away and finds new music that is similar so you can discover new cool stuff. It also takes your feedback on songs so it can improve what it picks out. It’s a customised radio station for you much like Launch Cast on Yahoo Music.

Unfortunately however, after blocking almost everyone else last year, Pandora have finally given up on trying to secure rights to play music in the UK having been unable to agree on a price with the music industry for licencing broadcast rights and so will only be available in the US after next week.

I’m currently in the process of testing out the new Worfolk Online Backup System which will automatically back up the sites in the network. It’s taken quite a bit of development but hopefully it should all come together now and it’s reasonable swish.

It supports daily, weekly and monthly backups all of which is done automatically. The system goes through the lists of sites and sends a request to cPanel to package everything up nicely so it can be easily restored in case of emergency. It also sends cPanel details of my off-site FTP server (the one I have here at Burchett Place) so cPanel can directly upload the backup via FTP.

Then later on the system logs in to my FTP servers and validates that the backup has been generated and logs the filename that has been generated. It then logs said status. You can then access the web based control panel, check to make sure everything is working via the log and see what backups are available for each site and download them if you wish.

I was reading a topic on Cozy Campus (an adult webmaster forum) earlier today about the gossip blog PerezHilton.com.

Standard ad (150×200):

One week: $9,000
One month: $30,000

Hi rise (150×600)

One week: $16,000
One month: $44.000

And before you say, “Yeah, but how many of those ads is he selling at those prices?”, take a look at his site and count them.

I count 15 standard size ads and 5 hi rise.

That’s over half a million dollars a month. I always said there was qood money in gossip blogs.

Clearing out a lot of old content on the Worfolk Online network I’ve come across a lot of random crap, especially when it comes to the CassieNet Wiki. Amist the random stories and half finished articles I found the long lost Sarann’s bad influence diary detailing how Sarann corrupted people. I present it now for your consideration.

Unfortunately some of the records have been lost and it was only maintained for a short period but just look at the destruction caused :p.

Monday 13rd February 2006
* Sarann destroy’s Anthony’s self esteem

Wednesday 15th February 2006
* Got Michelle drinking
* Got Liz eating meat

Tuesday 21st February 2006
* Encouraged Chris to steal the SE15 register

Tuesday 28th February 2006
* Got Michelle drunk and got her smoking

Friday 3rd March 2006
* Incouraging Andrew to fight at Rock Soc social

Tuesday 14th March 2006
* Getting Michelle to slip out of a CS12 lecture

Looking back it really makes me think about how much we have changed. I mean, do you remember when it used to be an achievement to get Michelle drinking? It seems like so long ago.

My server has been suffering quite a lot of downtime recently which on top of the less of revenue and amount of hours I have had to spend fixing it rather than doing uni work has had a far more important consequence - I have been unable to rant on my blog!

In order to solve this sites are getting moved around to new servers including my personal site which is now located on Jennifer.

Apparently.

That’s the reason my blog, and indeed most of my sites, all my DNS, the list goes on have been down for the past 3 days.

My scripts are fine based on all the checks I have done so I don’t know where the security leak was. So much for managed hosting.