The Webamaze Blog

As promised from the other day I’m now going to have a go at updating this, rather intermittent, blog.

To be honest not much has been happening on the site building front for weeks now. I’m still waiting to get the go ahead for the electricians site and I still haven’t done a thing about the Pocket Camcorder site. In fact I’ve now bought two more domain names so that I can jump in on the next big thing of Touch Screen PC’s.

I purchased yourtouchscreen.co.uk and yourtouchscreenpc.co.uk last week and I’m now looking at buying some software from Pan Fashion so that I can run a back end from Affiliate Window.  That should give me the ability to update the site automatically and also include more merchants than I can with Your Netbook.

That site is now becoming something of a pain having to update the ever changing prices and also with the high turnover of new models almost every week. The site still brings in a bit of money but no where near to what I was hoping for. Once I get the Touch Screen site up and running then I WILL  launch the Pocket Camcorder site using the new software and then Your Netbook will get the treatment too.

This time next year Rodders we’ll be millionaires. Maybe!!

I must update this.
I must update this.
I must update this.
I must update this.
I must update this.
I must update this.
I must update this.

Yes I know. I’ll try and get round to it this week.

Promise

I’ve recently given my Twitter account a re-think and now what was originally a Twitter just for my own personal use with a mixture of affiliate/netbook/football and personal followers has now devolved into two.

It used to be known as Twitter.com/Harriers9. I then thought it would be good to have a Harriers Online Twitter to go with the Harriers Online Facebook page that was relatively popular. That Twitter account was set up a few weeks ago, Twitter.com/HarriersOnline, and it took off straight away with plenty of followers although I did have a good session following other football Twitterers in an attempt to populate mine.

 Then I had another brainwave and thought why not have a Twitter page for Your Netbook.

The problem here was that before the recently updated Tweetdeck it wasn’t easy to have multiple Twitter accounts let alone three. I found that when I was logged into my personal Twitter account and saw a good football related one I’d click on ‘Follow’ and then realise my mistake that it wouldn’t actually show up on the Harriers Online account. Durrr!!

As I said I didn’t want a third account but accepted that my personal account wasn’t really getting used properly so I investigated changing that into the Twitter.com/YourNetbook version. I just couldn’t believe how easy it was and how very strange that you could change the Username, the login email address, the password and the colours to make a totally new site but keep all your followers. Not quite kosher really.

Anyway it took all of ten minutes to transform and mutate from one to the other. I told a few followers that it had changed but the rest probably don’t even realise yet.

It couldn’t happen with Facebook.

As an aside. Last week the KHFC Official site also set up their own Twitter and Facebook pages. Lol or what.

I spent the weekend updating the Prediction League on Harriers Online to the latest (paid for) version from Prediction Football.

The original idea was to merge it with the previous version from last season but the db was throwing up continual errors so I gave that up as a bad job. So I opened up a new db on Tsohost and installed it. I encountered no real problems except the weird one of the old one picking up the different username I had chosen for my admin.

This new one took a bit longer to set up the style sheet and once I got it looking good I asked a couple of users from last time out to take a look. Harry211 wasn’t too keen on the amount of green in it so I dumped that one and went for a more whiter look.

The new version also includes a load of flags scrolling along the top. I wasn’t too keen on that so I exchanged them for team logos instead and then had to redo them all because although I had kept to a uniform height the width of each gif was all over the place. I sorted that by using a consistent background size and pasting the smaller logos into that. It was all looking good again so last night I launched it onto an expectant world.

When I first mentioned earlier in the year that I was upgrading it someone suggested that it would be good to have a small charge made for participating and that could then be handed back as a prize for the top forecaster at the end of the season. So that’s just what I did. £5 entry fee for everyone and with twenty people entering that meant a £50 prize for the winner. Sounded good to me.

Just one problem. I get the impression that not everyone feels the need to part with any money now. I emailed all 300 of the forum users last night and also the users of last seasons Prediction League and so far – 24 hours later – not one person has signed up and that includes the person that first suggested charging for it. In fact he’s already been on Supareds asking if another League will be running next season and so giving the impression that he won’t be joining mine again.

I’ll give it a week to see what occurs. It looks like I’ll be dropping the entry fee then.

All that hard work wasted!!

One thing that I dislike about Wordpress is the plugins. OK they can add some incredible tricks into your blog and they usually run in the background getting on with their own little jobs.

I have a handful on here like the Google Sitemaps plugin, Twitpost, Simple Tags and Sociable. On Your Netbook I have those plus quite a few more like Link Cloaker and GD Star. It’s that last one that caused a whole load of trouble the other night.

The one thing that annoys me is, as I said that some run in the background, some others demand constant attention due to continual upgrades being made by their developer.

Almost every day Sociable and GD Star ask to be updated for petty reasons such as, it seems, a change in some minor thing like control panel layout or on one occasion a change to the link text colour.

Being someone that likes to keep things tidy I, of course, have to update them. First I need to get the server password so that I can carry out the update and then I click on the plugin that needs sorting only to find that it cannot access the server or their own server is down. Another error I get is that it can’t delete it’s own files to install the new versions.

The answer to that problem is to either delete the previous update or to change the permissions on my server. That’s just what happened on Friday evening when GD Star asked to be updated and wouldn’t let me.

As usual I changed the permission on the GD Star files but then when I went back to the control panel it suddenly locked me out and all I got was a blank page. I went straight to the website proper and that too had vanished. I just couldn’t believe it.

I quickly went back to reverse the permissions on GD Star and then to my horror found that wouldn’t let me change them either. Every time I tried to change them back I got a message along the lines of you are not allowed to change permissions on a remote server.

I tried to delete the plugin and again I got a similar error message that told me that I had not been given access to delete files on this server

It was getting late so I decided to leave it until the morning and went to bed. Saturday morning I took another look at the site in the hope it may have sorted itself out but no such luck. Still nothing there.

Back up and delete time then so I started doing that. A couple of hours later and it was almost all done apart from the GD Star files that refused to go.

It was obvious that I couldn’t leave them there when I re-install everything because the GD Star files would still be accessible by WP and I could have the same scenario all over again. The answer was to rename the GD Star folder to FAULTY and then WP wouldn’t know it was there.

I got to work re-installing from my backup and within the hour the main components of the site were there but the sidebar was all over the place. When I tried to access the theme editor it wouldn’t let me save the changes because of the permissions and try as I might I just couldn’t get them to work.

I asked a quick question about the problem on A4U and that evening I had received a reply telling me to look on this site: Theme Lab and that gave me the answer I needed.

Once I had that it was time to sort out the sidebar and then tidy up a few loose ends and the site was all back up and running.

The best bit of all, and to make it all worthwhile, was that I had my first sale in ages last night from a Dixons multibuy. Like it

Oh, and BTW, GD Star is back on there simply for the fact that I couldn’t find anything to replace it. I just hope it behaves itself in future.