BP Service Station - You are responsible for oil spills
Let’s call this a Sunday distraction. It came from someone on Twitter but I can’t remember who – if you know give me a ping so I can credit them properly
Archive for the ‘Rest of the Internet’ Category
A little BP irony
Sunday, June 6th, 2010Upgrading Ruby on Media Temple Grid Service
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010This is a little of topic but I am posting it her for anyone else looking for the answer because I couldn’t find it when i needed it.
Back Story:
I am developing a little Rails Application and need to update Ruby Gems to deploy the app to Media Temple. No such luck – I did what i knew to do to upgrade and kept getting the following error “Expected Ruby version >= 1.8.6, is 1.8.5″
I Googled a lot but couldn’t find anyway to upgrade Ruby so after a few head bashes I contacted support and waited for the reply.
Unfortunately, the latest version of the Ruby Gems requires at least version 1.8.6 to run the updater and your container is currently running 1.8.5. Until our engineers are able to upgrade to core version of Ruby running within the containers you will be unable to update your Gem versions. Due to the shared nature of the (gs) Grid-Service we would be unable to upgrade the version running within your individual container, as the upgrade would affect all customers across the (gs) Grid-Service with Ruby containers. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
Bit of a bummer, who knows how long that could take. Long story short, if you need a newer version of Ruby and you are hosted at Media Temple get a DV not the Grid Service. It is only $10 month more anyway (by the time you pay for the Grid service and the Rails Container) and more usefully, you get full root access.
Blog Theme Reviews
Monday, January 25th, 2010I have dropped my first post on my new project Blog Themes Reviewed. Given the extraordinary traffic that Big Commerce vs Shopify is bringing in I decided to start of with Thesis vs Headway.
Head over and leave me a note – I would love to know what everyone thinks.
Cheers, Andrew
Who's Managing your Online Store ?
Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009A couple of weeks ago I got a call from an old school ad man that sends me some web work because he couldn’t see a client website. I gave it a look and lo and behold it was gone. I could have been surprised but I have been online long enough to realise these things happen.
I did the usual checks and all the ducks seemed to be lined up – the website just wouldn’t display.
Being a straight forward kind of fellow, I picked up the telephone and rang the hosting company to see if something was amiss. 10 minutes on hold and the hosting company told me that it was a planned event and that they had sent numerous emails to prepare us for this outage. They gave me the information I needed (and that they had emailed the client originally) and I sent it to them on an email address I knew they would check.
Now I am not telling you this story to get you to check your email. That would be too simple.
I am telling you this because I checked the website this morning and it was still down. I made a few phone calls while I was having my morning coffee and I find out that the website was down for two weeks before my ad man mate noticed it – which means that as of this morning this website has been down for over a month.
Now we get to the reason for this story. This company had carefully sectioned off all of there IT and internet services so that an outage of one would not affect the other. One paper it was a sensible plan – in reality they had no website for over a month and 3 companies sending emails trying to work out who’s problem it was to fix.
Don’t misunderstand me there is good wisdom in spreading out your service provider’s, but at the end of the day if you can’t find someone that can give a straight answer as to the cause and time it will take to fix any problems, your life online will be miserable. Maybe even more importantly you need someone that knows about a problem as soon as possible – not two weeks later when an outsider happens to notice.
To that end let me offer few gems that have saved my bacon on more than one occasion.
- Make sure all your important accounts are setup with email addresses that will ALWAYS be checked (even years into the future)
- Use a service like Pingdom to be notified as soon as your website (or email) have a problem
Do you have anymore tips to help people keep sane online ? Drop us a comment or an email
What is the best blog platform for a business ?
Tuesday, September 8th, 2009This one keeps coming up. The only blog a business should run should be one hosted on there own domain, running under their own domain name.
- Do not use Blogger. Not even in publish mode. Not even with a custom domain
- Do not use WordPress.com
- Do not use Tumbr or Posterious no matter how simple they make it look.
Why do so many people chase me around on this one ? Is it because as a business in a building phase you are looking to save money anyway you can ? Is it because they are looking for the easy way out ? Ignore for a minute what some teenage, amateur web developer said or worse what that design agency quoted you, you can host your own blog and still afford dinner. I will even tell you how if you give me a minute.
Let me be clear I have nothing against these services and do use them form time to time for non-business reasons. However, when it comes to a business, a money making venture anything but full control of your online tools is simply unacceptable. You need to own and control every aspect of your website including your blog.
How can a business setup their own blog without spending a fortune ?
I will fly through this for now because over the next few days I will be expanding this into a series of posts.
- Download and install WordPress (if you can’t any capable geek can do it for less than $100)
- Make it look good. Either use one of the free themes WordPress provides access to or if you are after something a little smarter try something like the Thesis theme or something from Woo Themes
- Start blogging.
Experience has shown that greatest cost of getting a blog running is the design phase. To offset that I offer two alternatives. buy a pre-made theme, it won’t match your site or your branding but it will look sharp and visually effective. The other option is thesis which is great for the do it your-self bloggers. It offers an attractive default and an extremely flexible back-end that anyone can use to mold there blog into anything they want.
External Shopping Carts
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009[sb_child_list]
Hosted Shopping Carts
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009[sb_child_list]
Google is blocking Facebook !
Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008
Google Chrome seems to be blocking Facebook.
Installing a SSH Server on Ubuntu 8.10 or 9.10
Wednesday, November 12th, 2008
This code has also been tested and is working with Ubuntu 9.10
If you are planning on using you new Ubuntu installation remotely you will need to install an SSH server.
The most popular choice for SSH server on the linux platform is Open SSH. As with most common packages installation on Ubuntu is very straight forward.
sudo apt-get install openssh-server openssh-clientIt may take a while to install all the dependancies if you are installing on a new system. Once it has finished you can test it with
ssh localhost
To access the machine remotely you may need to configure your firewall to allow SSH connections. There are a few graphical applications that will let you do this easily – search Add/Remove Programs for firewall.
Installing Apache and PHP on Ubuntu
Tuesday, November 11th, 2008
This code and article have been tested and work for Ubuntu 9.10
Installing Apache on Ubuntu is relatively simple and can be done in four or five commands with little or no experience.
First we install Apache
sudo apt-get install apache2
This will install and start the web server, create the /var/www directpry for your web pages, create the Apache2 service and install apache2ctl a command line tool to control the web server.
To test the installation is working open your browser to http://localhost/ you should see a plain page that says “It works!”. That will let you know your web server is running and serving up static HTML pages. Any web pages you put in /var/www/ will be available to view under http://localhost/
If you only want to develop static web pages this will be enough, if however you would like to create scripted pages with PHP you will need to install the PHP 5 binaries and the libraries needed for Apache integration.
sudo apt-get install php5
Will install PHP 5
sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-php5
will install the Apache PHP module to glue the two pieces together.
Assuming you got no errors you should be setup and ready to develop PHP applications on an Apache server. Restart Apapche for the changes to take effect with
sudo apache2ctl restart
To test that PHP pages are being correctly executed create the file create a test php file.
sudo gedit /var/www/test.php
Put the following code into the file and nothing else
<?php
phpinfo();
?>
open your web browser to http://localhost/test.php if you see a purple page with your System and PHP information on it you have a fully functional development environment.
Congratulations and get your code on!
