denyerec.co.uk

As promised, the article is now grabbable here, it’s a big JPEG and the quality is a bit pants. If you just wanna see what I said (Go me!) then, well, that’s right here.

Thanks to Valuehost playing a little too heavily on the value and not so much on the host, my site went down for 4 days. Right at the time when my webby’s URL got into a national magazine. Bummer.
Partly in anger, partly through sensibility and partly thanks to a paypal donation from a very good friend of mine (You’ll get it back when I get paid, honest!), I have switched hosts to United Hosting. They have servers in the US, and they answer tedious support queries within 5 minutes when it’s 2am GMT. Kudos.

Now the bad news… Site migration went OK, but their server setup is a little different so I can’t upload any new images with my old script until I get things fixed up. Hold in there, revisit the gallery and please, please please let me know if you find something that’s not working as I’ll need to patch it up.

Magazine extract to follow, as soon as I fix image uploads.

www.denyerec.co.uk got its first piece of national recognition today amongst the pages of Digital Music Maker magazine. It was regarding the Grey Tuesday protest which happened a bit back. Those of you who visit regularly will recall the site turning grey, etc.
Well, shortly after a journo wrote to everyone on the GT website, asking for quotes to go into an article. I obliged, he said my response was perfect and lo, it’s in print. I’m scanning the page for you good people, and will be putting it up here for you to see as soon as I can.

Me, in print! Hah. Now if only that album had been my kind of music…

My hosts, Valuehost were allegedly hit by a Denial of Service attack today, bringing all their hosted sites to their knees. Including this one.
Apologies for the interruption of service, though really they’re the ones who need to say sorry. They boast 99.9% uptime which, if you do a rough calculation, means they expect to be offline for just under 9 hours in every 8,760 (That’s 365 days, for those of you out there who do not see in nubmers.)
They were out for about 9 hours today, so I’m now looking forward to 364 days of uninterrupted service… Hah!

News in from the BBC today to make me angry, right here.
Read the rest of this entry »

A site was forwarded to me a few moment ago, it was this one, it’s got something to do with a tennis website.
The most interesting part of the article was a section toward the bottom of the document, which reads as follows…

To deter Webmasters from using these photos on other Webpages or using them outside the above permitted uses, I have been advised to set a scale of standard charges for unauthorised use. This makes it extremely easy to obtain significant damages for unauthorised use of the photos, by applying the legal process from any court in a country that is a signatory to the Berne Convention, most Countries in the world have signed this convention.

The scale of charges are:
250 US dollars per Week per Photo, starting from the date of the infringement.
Unpaid bills accrue interest.
Expenses incurred by myself and the collection Agency, in the collection of these fees are also chargeable.

I think that’s a rather good idea myself… Read the rest of this entry »

Finally, Dr Hope is going back to work. They’re out of pocket by a couple of grand, the waiting lists have grown a little and poor Dr Hope has been splattered all over the internet tabloids.

Still, at least he’s getting back to work on Friday. It still amazes me that they had to suspend him and are treating the matter “Urgently”, it’s not as if he killed anyone, or administered the wrong drugs…

I seem to have spent today chasing details. Insignificant little things that for some reason have consumed more time than I’d prefer. Todays major end result, the one I can show to you easily, is the “favicon”. Lo, the munky is in the address bar and in your bookmarks. If you still haven’t taken my advice then you may have to delete your old bookmark and make a new one for it to show up. People using decent browsers won’t have a problem.

I think he’s kinda cute.

If any of you out there want to do this to your site, it’s really quite simple. First up, make yourself a 16×16 pixel image in the editor of your choice and save it as a BMP or a GIF. Then go to Chami.com where they’ll kindly turn your BMP or GIF, online, into the required .ICO format for you, for free. Cool eh?

Then you simply upload the favicon.ico file to the same place as your main HTML file and add the following code in the <HEAD> section of your HTML:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" />

Simple!

Today I ‘installed’ a stats utility for my website called BBClone and it’s really rather good! I say ‘installed’ because truly, it was the most painless thing I’ve ever done to this website. Couple of clicks, a couple of pre-defined lines of code to add to the pages I wanted tracking and bingo, full stats. I’m not sure if I want to publicise the URL for the stats page or not but I have to say I’ve been surprised by the results. So far I’ve had unique hits from places as far afield as Japan and Hungary, way to go me!

Sadly Internet Explorer is capping out the most used browser stats, which is a crying, crying shame. Please, people, do something good today. I may consider killing a kitten for every hit via Internet Explorer, but I don’t think I could find that many cats at short notice.