So what does ABS stand for?
May 26 at 11:11am by ObverseView
I always thought that ABS stood for Anti-Braking System in cars. Apparently, though ab workout doesn’t mean that you practice your driving, you’ve got to drive those muscles bigger by getting special workouts for those areas of your body!
Are you kidding? Who has the time to do all that? It does seem that there are quite a lot of people who are interested in scissor kicks, crunches, and much more!
After visiting the site, I realized that the site owner needs a little help with his site design. There are weird gaps between the graphics, the actual link doesn’t work, and page links that just don’t work. Seriously? Are you trying to drive your visitors away!
If you’re going to do AM, do a decent job!
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Long Task: Choosing your hosting
Apr 25 at 11:11pm by ObverseView
Choose it carefully! I just finished a large task of moving a blog from one server to another, and there were so many problems that it made me a little ‘nuts’.
The blog itself was a pretty big blog with over 500 posts, and dozens (hundreds?) of images in the files. But the hosting company that I was removing it from did some very dubious things:
- had a large db size that meant normal uploading the mysql db was impossible,
- they wouldn’t let me download the files properly at all and kept truncating our downloads for some reason or other,
- wouldn’t accept Cobian connections properly despite ‘supporting it’,
- provided no unified backup at all of the entire site,
- didn’t even backup the site properly for a year (I suspect),
thus making the whole process difficult extremely so.
What’s worse, they upgraded my account without first checking that that was okay, and expect to deduct the charges from my credit card. Of course, I’ll pay. But the first month only.
And the hosting company that first tried to lock in and overcharge their customers: MediaTemple.
Several other companies I worked with in the past: Hostmonster, Dreamhost, and Bluehost all made it easy to come and go, and have earned my respect for their prompt service, full backup, and ease of use. I will recommend them for these reasons.
Perhaps MediaTemple feels it’s unnecessary to provide backups because of their site stability but other users found reason to fault their service, esp. its reliability. Mmm.
I just feel that if I treated all my customers like that I wouldn’t have any left…!
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Problems with Hosting
Apr 21 at 11:11pm by ObverseView
Anyone who knows my blog will remember that I’ve had various hosting companies over the years. Dreamhost, BlueFur, BlueHost, Hostmonster, MediaTemple, and SBI (which isn’t really a hosting company per se).
So I think I can see the problems when it comes to choosing budget hosting. In reality, budget hosting is exactly what you read on the can: budget. If you are looking to host a hobby site, run a small online community, put up your photos or a family type blog, it will be fine.
The problems come when your blog or site becomes overly popular. Perhaps the fame is expected; or not. Whatever happens, if your blog does get Dugg, many cheap hosting companies will either turn off your site or simply throttle your site. In fairness, this response is reasonable since a hosting server at one of these companies will host dozens if not hundreds of accounts on a server (the contention rate!).
This is bad news for you, if you are expecting your site to be available, and spent time/energy and money preparing for this very day, only to find that there’s a server 500, or a note from the hosting company. But really for $2.95 pm … what did you expect?
As Caroline Middlebrook found out (and one of the reasons I switched my site away), the hosting companies can be rather strict with sites that have ‘issues’ regardless of whether it’s their fault or not. So, I recommend some very simple principles for hosting on a budget:
1. Always buy your domains in a separate domain registrar from your hosting
If you buy your domain and hosting together, and many newbies do, this is a recipe for disaster with unreputable companies. Why? Because the company can simply refuse to transfer your domain to another hosting company if you don’t agree to upgrade the hosting plan or pay the additional charges.
2. Always keep a backup of your site that is recent
See reason #1. You don’t want to be hostage to your hosting company. Ever. Many webmasters have been there; and found out that even though you may be in the right, you still don’t get your site back.
3. Try not to put ALL your eggs in one basket
If you have several hosting plans, then you can spread your sites between them. It may cost a little more in the short term, but if the sh*t hits the fan, at least you can switch your problem sites quickly. I’ve noticed that DNS resolutions do seem to take effect within a few hours now, so having an emergency space at the ready can mean your site is back quickly.
Of course, if you are running sites that are ESSENTIAL or that can’t fail, you should be looking at choosing more robust hosting arrangements than just budget hosting will ever offer. Try going up a couple of price bands!
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How long should I keep blogging?
Mar 7 at 11:11pm by ObverseView
I’ve been working away on my blogs for a number of years now, and in the process of blogging, I’ve learned a great deal about the technology, blogging, writing and myself.
But with so many great websites that I am keen to build (now about 5 or 6), and I only have time to build one at a time… my coffee site is now at 50 pages, and there is still a LOT to do, but traffic is building nicely so far… I have to ask myself if my time for building blogs is over or if it just needs a sabbatical or at least a small hiatus.
So, I am reaching a decision: I will quit blogging if the earnings from my coffee site ever reaches the amount I make from blogging directly (about $70 per month). Once that is the case, perhaps it’s time to take a rest, and work on sites with a little more permanency.
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PurelyCoffeeBeans Rocks On! 48 pages and counting!
Mar 3 at 12:12am by ObverseView
My new site is coming along very nicely, if you’re interested in Coffee Beans. I recently uploaded the 48th page of content/information, though I have to redo the last eight pages. But I’m surprised how quick it is that I was able to put together even a site like this.
There is still much to do, as I have to …
1. Finish the 8 pages of content
2. Add photographs… I’m now needing dozens of pictures (at least 35)…
3. I need to redo the descriptions and metatags on some articles
4. Consider the footers carefully
5. Strengthen the linking between pages, that’s a huge task just there, as I haven’t finalized the structure of the site.
And then I need to get back to writing or rewriting the new content. But I might take a little break after this period.
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Get in on the "next” Wave: Would you like a ‘free invite’ to Google Wave?
Dec 7 at 4:04pm by ObverseView
Google Wave is a new phenomenon from Google that aims to supplement other modes of synchronous/non-synchronous discussion such as chat or forums.
This is what Wikipedia says: “Google Wave is designed as a new Internet communications platform. It is written in Java using OpenJDK and its web interface uses the Google Web Toolkit. Google Wave works like previous messaging systems such as email and Usenet, but instead of sending a message along with its entire thread of previous messages, or requiring all responses to be stored in each user’s inbox for context, message documents (referred to as waves) that contain complete threads of multimedia messages (blips) are perpetually stored on a central server. Waves are shared with collaborators who can be added to or removed from the wave at any point during a wave’s existence.” Wikipedia.
I’ve been trying it out for a couple of weeks, and and am still feeling my way around the system. However, if you are interested in trying it out, you need an invitation since the system is still in ‘private beta’.
Good news: I have about 15 to give away. All you have to do is just sign up for my feed via email. And I’ll speed the invite on its way to you.
Waving you a happy day!
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AsianCorrespondent.com New Asian Blog Site
Oct 27 at 11:11am by ObverseView
Simon Owens recently asked me to refer him to some Asian bloggers, which I duly did, not really knowing that much about Taiwan Bloggers. However, it seems as if the project he was engaged in has finally borne some fruit. Simon’s new site… is Asian Correspondent.
Hey, I don’t know if you remember me but I contacted you a few months ago regarding a new Asian news site that was launching in the fall. Not sure if you’ve seen it yet but Asiancorrespondent.com just launched; we found 50 Asian bloggers and paid them to move their blogs over to our site, and we’re aggregating their content along with Asian-specific wire copy:
http://asiancorrespondent.com/
Anyway, I thought this was something you and your readers would find interesting.
Take care,
Simon
Good luck on that site, it looks interesting. Even more so for bloggers, you can also register and submit articles. In the meantime, I’ll add a feed for Taiwan to the sidebar. Check it out, and see what you think!
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Bejeweled Blitz on FaceBook
Oct 25 at 10:10am by ObverseView
I admit it, I’m addicted, again. After being addicted earlier this decade, I managed to escape from my addiction twice before, but right now I’m totally blitzed.
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Building a bilingual site: With WordPress
Aug 28 at 11:11am by ObverseView
Well, my approach was perhaps simplistic: my blog is already utf-8 so that was one plus. But the approach worked but then I decided to go bilingual on the reader side only: Since I was using WordPress, it was relatively simple. If you are using one theme, and Chinese and English should look similar… Get one theme as you like it by editing.
Make a copy of the theme in a new folder in wp-content/themes/theme-2. Then simply edit the theme-2 so that each of the important comments is in Chinese. ( I think I got most of that covered!)
Since you can do this in WordPress Admin, it’s not particularly fussy. Just ‘search’ for the English, paste the Chinese in place of the English, hit ‘submit’ and voila!
The subtlety though was in using the theme switcher plugin. I decided to embed the theme switching code in the URL, then create a new page (for the top bar). Enter the page title and using the redirection plugin set the page as redirecting to the English version with the theme code appended at the end thus.
Code:http://www.yoursite.com/?wptheme=English
I conveniently named my themes English and Chinese! Of course, like me, you’ll also have to create pages in Chinese and pages in English … right now, thought, the theme switch isn’t permanent, (it used to be… not sure why? could be a new plugin I’m using). I would like the theme switch to be permanent, and it should work.
You’ll notice that some categories are only in the English Blog, that some posts cover all languages, … that’s because our audiences are mixed languages. Also, you’ll notice that the feeds are run of site, so no specific language segregation there. It works for us, but there are some other compromises, too. So it’s not a perfect solution.
For more details, you can read the original post here.
Kenneth
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Buggy Server Today: Apologies
Jul 23 at 12:12pm by ObverseView
Server keeps skipping today. I upgraded to the latest version of everything, so I don’t know if that’s the issue yet. If you see this, just bide your time we’ll be back shortly.
Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.
Please contact the server administrator, *@obblogatory.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. etc..
Best
Kenneth
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