Archive for the ‘Websites’ Category

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.

Before I start I’m going to state a few things. I’m going to say something that’s a bit out there, a bit controversial and a bit, at first glace, counter-intuitive. But never the less I am going to put the proposition forward.

Private profiles and turning Facebook into MySpace.

There, I said it. It seems crazy at first, after all the point of Facebook is that you are connecting with your existing real world connections and that it isn’t just an open directory of internet aliases.

But the fact is, this recurrent doom that people keep talking about has failed to materialise. They let Leeds Met onto Facebook, nothing really went wrong. They let the whole world onto Facebook, I’m not going to pretend I am pleased about that but it didn’t turn Facebook into MySpace. They added applications and yes they are very annoying, but you choose to list the people as friends that send you the application invites and you can say no. I do. It keeps my profile nice and clean, it’s still Facebook.

Private profiles however, I would argue are doing some damage. What I truely loved about Facebook was that each university had it’s own network and you could pretty much move freely around that network. You could see new people’s profiles, see what mutual friends you have in common, see the connections. Private profiles prevent you from doing this.

This hysteria about keeping your profile private is ruining the Facebook experience and turning Facebook into the jungle of uncommon ground and paranoia that is MySpace. It’s a slippery slope my friends, a slippery slope.

Is anyone else having problems with Facebook’s AJAX? Not that it isn’t working and this doesn’t just apply to the AJAX, it applies to pages as well but you can’t just click refresh with AJAX, the point is, I end up on clicking things like event confirmations and poke back links and the AJAX isn’t loading in the details, presumably because it lost the connection with the web server. As previously mentioned this is a much bigger problem compared with normal pages when you can just click refresh. Generally though, I just think Facebook’s servers have been a little unresponsive lately.

Stumbling through a series of blogs I noticed that the debate over Google punishing sites for selling text links has flaired up again.

Having read over Danny Sullivan’s post, while I agree with some of the points, I think it’s important to state why I disagree with others. First of all, I feel like Google is telling me what to do with my site. It seems hypocritical that I am being told I cannot sell text links on my website from a website which generates the majority of it’s revenue from selling text links!

Secondly, yes I am free to ignore Google if I wish, continue selling text links, Google can’t tell us what to do. But of course, in reality, they can. Google provides a huge amount of traffic, often more than any other source. They effectively have a monopoly on search engine traffic so we have to follow their guidelines. When Microsoft abuse their massive market share there is public outcry, competition comissions get involved, etc. But when Google say “you’re not allowed to make any money from simple text links anymore if you want anyone to visit your website” few people seem to see a problem with it.

On that point, I think it is also important to point out that Google is explicitly doing this maliciously. This isn’t a few algorithm roll-out designed to re-adjust the search engine results so that you get better results. A lot of it is human review of websites to decide whether they are making money or not and punishing them accordingly.

Finally, it’s certainly worth noting that there will be civilian casualties from this move. Because, when it comes down to it, there is no way to differentiate between sites that are buying and selling links to gain PR and sites that are just buying and selling links innoncently. How about sites such as my network which aren’t even selling links but just link to each other? I mean, are hyperlinks just banned now or what?

Does anyone remember when Google used to have web results?

I’ve finally made some changes to my blogroll. With Raby getting his blog started I decided it was finally time to make some changes. So I took a few blogs off that I either don’t read any more or people simply weren’t posting on them anymore which annoys me as the way I read blogs is to go to my blog roll, hold ctrl and click every link. I’ve also added a few more blogs.

Is it really so hard to publish current information on a website?

Having just got off the phone from Argos who have lost my order (not the order contents but actually any record of the order ever being made) I headed off to Tesco’s website to find out when they are open as today is a bank holiday. But they have actually taken the information off! Last time I was on there I could find out all about the holiday opening hours but it’s not available anymore. They’ve done away with the “when is Tesco open this week” section and replaced it with standard static opening times text.

This was something I was thinking about earlier with regards to the union. Would it be so hard for them to have a page listing what is open when? They occasionally publish the term time and non-term time opening hours on each page for the shop or bar but it’s never in any kind of easily accessible fashion. Nor is it usually that accurate.

Things like when the union closes for the day. This never appears on the website. They have a sign on the front door saying “closed.” The website still claims The Old Bar is open. Still claims The Terrace is open till 12:30. Has no information on Extras out of term time opening hours. It has no information on when The ARC is open, when the cash office is open, hell, when the union building itself is open.

Is it really so much to ask for a bit of current information?

Doing a random search I suddenly stumbled upon the fact that Worfolk.org was available for registration. Confirming that it was indeed available (I didn’t want to get my hopes up as someone has been sat on it for a while) I snapped it up with great pleasure. It’s currently just redirecting to Worfolk.biz but at least now it’s under my control.

Unfortunately there are still squatters sat on the .com and .net.

The beta version of ChrisWorfolk.com v3 is now available for your viewing pleasure at beta.chrisworfolk.com. It’s a lot clearer than the current site and easier to read and it uses a nicer URLs. There are a few issues with it at the moment, mainly that it has only been tested in Firefox so far and suffers from some issues when displaying in Internet Explorer.