Entries Tagged 'Uncategorized' ↓

Where is the Zune buzz? Nowhere. They’re gonna bundle that thing with other doodads soon. The only buzz about Zune is the one the marketing people are working on to take the edge off of how dismal it’s going to be.

For those who don’t know, or don’t realize it, the next phase of life on the internet will be some sort of CMS (Content Management System). A CMS allows you to focus on contributing content to a site and not on writing code. Well, that is, once you have done all the planning and/or coding to set everything up the way you want it. Blog-centric CMS software such as WordPress, MoveableType, Blogger, etc all make it a lot easier to get started and to customize things. More powerful solutions such as Mambo/Joomla, Drupal, etc offer far more potential for customization, yet have a much bigger set of steps to climb to have a functioning, unique web site. Continue reading →

Mysteriously, it is now working. Sadly, like so many software applications (the iTunes store is a software application!) There were no updates or prompts nor any kind of feedback telling the user (me) what was really happening or what happened in a clear way. I understand it was probably some kind of server error or data crash on the server side, but most iTunes Store users will not even begin to guess something like that and will likely instead interpret that kind of message to mean that their account is gone or fouled up.

In this new paradigm of online music and video sales, Apple can not afford to screw it up. Lucky for them, the odds of anyone else making a more user-friendly, consumer-friendly implementation are slim odds indeed.

What the heck is going on here?! I use iTunes and the iTunes Store every day on average. It is the source by which I am happy to catch the Daily Show and the Colbert Report at my leisure. It worked yesterday. Today, no dice. Instead I get the following message:

We could not complete your iTunes Store request. The requested resource was not found. There was an error in the iTunes Store. Please try again later.

Well this stinks. Why did it stop working all of a sudden? I want to purchase something. This is not good for business, is it?

Well it took them a few hours to get it all working again, but my hosting provider’s servers are all back up it seems. Whew! What relief. Now, some people complained and then some about this outage, but hey, I’m not going to do that. I have dealt with the customer service myself and it was great, so that’s not something I can complain about. And outages in general? Can’t complain there either. All systems have limits. If you put anything under the right circumstances, it will break. I understand that, and I am well aware of the kinds of things that can and do go wrong with computer hardware and software. And hey, I’m not paying the kind of premiums that it costs to have 99.99% uptime. Even the big boys like Yahoo and Amazon and Google have problems sometimes. I thank my host for working their butts off at 3a.m. their time to straighten it all out as quick as possible. They deserve a nice cold beer right now. I’ve seen intranets take longer to get back online.

Hmm… blog it and something happens. No sooner did I post something about Amazon Associates flaking out, Continue reading →

The old version of this blog, at goodbyehelicopter.blogspot.com has suffered recently (currently) from a lack of graphics. Apparently Google/Blogger has gone and done it again, Continue reading →

I find that most Google sites work well with Safari. But of all sites that wouldn’t, I am shocked that the Adsense site doesn’t properly work with Safari. When you reach the last page of Continue reading →

Wow. WP is pretty darn powerful and sophisticated. Clearly, with all this capability comes complication. It is not nearly as easy to edit the appearance as it is with Blogger.
Of course it loads pages faster and WP is under your control, on your server, so that is your only limitation in terms of performance, and may be more of an asset than a liability.

But the intermingling of PHP stuff with the XHTML and CSS is pretty intimidating at times. Oh it is readable, though PHP is known for being ugly. The problem is that there is a whole lot of it. Little of the structure or styel is centralized or documented well for beginners. Instead, what you get is a lot of disparate PHP files to work with, though they are well-named, and largely self-documenting internally. Regardless how much XHTML CSS and PHP you know, there is a lot there to figure out if you’re new to WordPress.

The same old problem with all technology stuff: There is always something more to learn.