December 2004 Archives
Mum and Dad have a lot of friends.
How do I know? This year they're spending Christmas in Thailand with some friends. Fortunately they weren't by the coast when the Earthquake and tidal waves struck so they're fine.
For the last week the shop has had calls from many many people (some even managed to find my home phone number) all calling to find out if everything was OK with my parents. It's nice to know so many people care for them.
Another thing I learn't when growing up which now means a lot more to me:
You don't always need to know the answer, just how to find out the answer.
I learnt that at ATC, during staff cadet training we didn't need to know all the rules, but we were expected to know where to go and find the answer among the many books the ATC had.
Thanks to those who've pointed out the bugs on the site so far. The current list reads:
- Comments Don't work
- Font size too small
- Site is different in Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox
I'll get to looking at the comments as soon as I get time.
Did you know you can change the font size for this site (and any other standards compliant site) in your browser? It's simple, just select
"View" from the menu bar, then "Text Size" from the list, then choose to make it larger or smaller. The font size you see on your screen is affected by many things including the size of your screen and some Windows settings.
The differences between Firefox and Internet Explorer are down to the way they implement the web's CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) standards (or more likely the way I've written my style sheet). Eventually I'll figure out why they are different and fix them to be the same.
So the last posting date for Christmas was today. Once again, I've missed it. Merry Christmas to all my friends and relatives reading this and wondering where your card is.
Of course, normally I don't write any cards (and this year has been no exception) because Rhonda sorts that out every year. This year she's been delayed by me not sorting out the list. Normally that involves me copying Mums address list, then adding our friends but this year Mums list on the computer appears to be missing almost everyone.
I really would like to be more organised when it comes to friends addresses and contact details. Written on bits of paper here and there, never to hand when I need it (or Rhonda needs it). The solution? I think I'm going to find an online address book. If any of you know of any please let me know.
I had a look at a couple of the ones I've known of. Most seem to suffer with not holding the data the way I want. For example, our friends Darren and Rebecca live at the same address but each have their own mobile number (not uncommon that), but I don't really want to enter their address twice because that will make next years Christmas card list complicated. I think the best solution is for me to write a system myself.
- Cons:
- It will take me some time
- I'm probably doing what another website is already doing for free
-
Pros:
- The practice will be good
- can use it from anywhere, got full control of the layout
- already have a login system that I wrote for another site that I can re-use
The Pros seem to be winning. I guess it will all depend on how boring the TV is over Christmas, and how complicated I make the database scheema (scheema = plan of how the database works).
Of course, I'm also back to thinking of whether we should really be sending cards at all. I'm not bothered whether I recieve a card, I'm happy to get nothing or may be even a hello by email for the people I haven't seen for most of the year. Maybe I should go and send some "Merry Christmas" emails instead, now, where did I put that list of email addresses....
Uncle Dave's been teaching Nicola to snowboard - aren't uncles great :)
He's taken a video of her on his new phone. Follow the video link and hopefully you'll be able to see it too.
Dave is running the London Marathon this year. His chosen charity is the Meningitis Trust and if you are feeling generous you can sponsor him online at Justgiving - Dave's London Marathon Page. Dave's been doing a lot of running lately and is really enjoying it.
Coldfusion seems to be better lately. I haven't set the cron job up to restart the server every night but I have changed some of the coldfusion settings. It appears that a software update may have changed some of the memory variables for the 'JRun server'. Jrun was trying to take all 256mb of memory on the server and not let anything else use it. I reset it first to 128mb which helped, and now 64mb and the server's been fine since. The website seem to be performing fine but I think I'll keep watching it closely just in case.
As always, newsgroups were handy for research and I've got a few optimisation tips from them too.
Granddads Life story is currently hosted on the business website http://www.rootskitchens.co.uk/family/les_root_story.php. There's also a guestbook for people to leave a message and say hello. Despite it's relatively low traffic there's always been a level of spam that gets sent to it. When it happens I remove them. I was surprised today to be spammed by another furniture company. Their website looks pretty good too, I guess they are just trying to hard to be noticed. What defines spam for me? Well, it's not relevant for a furniture company to be listing:
Oak furniture,tables,chairs.Bespoke furniture,tables,chairs
along with the website URL in a guestbook for a life story.
I guess they thought the guestbook was related to the business site in some way.
I remembered today that one year I took all of my Easter Eggs to the local childrens ward and gave them away. The year before I'd fallen over when skiing and broken my arm. I spent the whole of Easter (well, it may have only been a day or two because memories aren't always accurate) in the Childrens ward. What on earth must Mum have thought? Was that so unusual a thing to do? I remember the nurses being perplexed by my arrival. I wonder if Nicola and James will do unexpected things like that and can only assume they will.
I've begun a new category today called "Posts waiting to happen". If you see anything here its because it may be relevant for some to ready, but I'm not happy to list it as a complete entry. This will also be a category for me to place 'draft' and 'future' status posts. These types of post doesn't show on the website but placing them here will let me see easily the things I've started and not finished. All told, this is like a scrap book of ideas section, some things you'll be able to see and some you wont.
Two ideas, firstly a new catagory for things waiting to be posted but not yet ready.
Second, an interesting link exchange that might be worth a go... or may be not.
It's official - my web server occupies 0.00099% of the entire London datacentre floor space. Calculated courtesy of an email from Rackspace Managed Hosting who gave the total floor area of London datacentres as 303,030 Sq Feet.
Now you know that, you can carry on with your day with a knowing smile :)
If you want to buy an Australian Domain name, you can only buy it through one company, www.melbourneit.com. Look closely at their domain name price structure and you'll notice they rates are in US Dollars and not Australian Dollars! Prices for hosting are in AUD though, but I can't think why they'd charge in USD for the names.
Well, it's up an running. This site is live. Well, if you count a count a grand total of three visitors (Hello Sister Sharon, Friend Alex and Friend Clive - that is if you ever come back to read this).
I keep a log file for all the sites I run and for this site it gives the not very impressive visitor statistics of:
| General Web Traffic Statistics | (Figures in parentheses refer to the 7-day period ending 02-Dec-2004 21:23). | Notes on their meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Successful requests: | 519 (368) | number of files the server delivered. A file is each page and each image. So a single page request will often be 10 or so requests. Commonly called Hits. |
| Average successful requests per day: | 46 (52) | |
| Successful requests for pages: | 211 (159) | a.k.a it all worked from the servers point of view and a page was sent to the computer that requested it. |
| Average successful requests for pages per day: | 18 (22) | |
| Failed requests: | 91 (75) | Uh oh, this means it didn't all work correctly. EG I didn't put the correct image name in a file. Also gets counted here if you go to a page that doesn't exist. I study the log files on sites to find the causes of these problems so I can fix them and hopefully keep this number at zero. |
| Distinct files requested: | 70 (61) | We know how many files had been requested by visitors, but this tells us how many files we have actually used on the server. In this case there were only 61 files on the server that were used, although several must have been sent more than once because 368 file requests were made by visitors. |
| Distinct hosts served: | 20 (20) | Distinct hosts means number of computers, but thats not the same as number of people. Actually, it isn't really number of computers, its number of internet addresses that connected to the server and asked for a page. At the shop we only have one internet address but several computers, a clever box called a router sorts out where traffic is going to and from. Even though I used two computers at the shop the server would only see one host. 20 sounds like a lot right? Well the shop IP address stays the same, but at home (where I've created several pages) it changes every half day or so. That's probably up to about 6 then. Add Sharon, Clive & Alex (I told them the site was here but they may not have come) then its about 9 hosts. Add the groups of servers that get told automatically when I update a page (built into the movabletype software so that people with weblogs can let each other know when a blog has been updated) and before you know it you've got 20 host visits but only 4 real people. |
| Data transferred: | 3.02 megabytes (1.99 megabytes) | If you think that an old floppy disk held 1.4megabytes, then this week the server sent out one and a bit. I pay for the amount of bandwidth the sites on my server use so I watch these numbers for all the sites on the server to make sure none of them are using too much. Too much? Well, the server currently sends around 3,500 old style floppy disks full of data every month to visitors, but has a basic capacity of sending about 22,000 disks per month. If you're wondering what the real values are: 5GB usage, 30GB per month before I'm charged more. |
| Average data transferred per day: | 279.44 kilobytes (291.57 kilobytes) |
(I use a program called analog to analyse the log files in case you were interested)
Ho-hum, now theres some content worth looking at it must be time to submit to the search engines (say in a loud deep voice).
So tonight I've submited to:
- DMOZ - a directory site that needs a real person to verify the entry
- Yahoo Directory - a bit like DMOZ but it will probably take longer. Out of nostalgia I thought I'd list here first because it was the first site on the internet I ever went to... more on that another time. When I started the business it was easy to get listed although today business generally have to pay and the free submission have no guarantees of being listed. Still, nowdays most people use a search engine rather than a directory site (di't'ave those when i were a boy on t'net).
- Google - a proper search engine that's ever so popular. I'll let you know how long before the first google spider comes visiting the site.
Oh well, that's it for tonight, more ramblings later
Today, OFWAT (the government body that ensures the water companies in the UK are acting responsibly) announced that water bills will be rising across the UK. The news media all started saying how bad it was and that the water companies made 1.4 billion (or some such figure) and therefore didn't need to raise the prices anyway. As is typical with the media when they report this type of story, they fail to mention half the relevant facts. So, lets go find them on the internet and come to our own conclusion (or at least, you'll get to read my opinion).
As some of you know, my webserver runs coldfusion which keeps the business site ticking over nicely. Well, normally it does, but just recently it seems to be playing up and the only way I discover this is when the web pages no longer work.
