Hosting?

Well, I’ve setup my website/blog temporarily here at WordPress.com. It seems that Spoonohost is at the end of it’s useful life. Downtime after downtime, very little support or communication. As this email shows, the owners don’t particularly care;

Hello to all of you Spoono Forums members, this is your retired admin Spooky. Personally, I haven’t been to the forums, or and Spoono network site in some time after I resigned from my administration position.

Although, it goes to show you even after my resignation they still have yet to take me off of the administration list. Well, I have known that spambots have been attacking the forums for some time and I am now sick of it. I rather save whats left of Spoono, especially since Spoono Host is bringing in a little extra cash for some college students.

So, today I have closed the Spoono Forums until Brian and/or Akash come to an agreement or understanding that the community needs a little help and tender-loving-care. I am aware that some of the users are Spoono Host customers, and to further provide support to you guys, please contact support either through the Live Chat feature on the main page of SpoonoHost.com , or through the provided e-mails.

Thanks again, and I wish everyone the best.

Best Regards,
Ryan Barr
“Spooky”

Well, Spoonohost.com, Spoono.com and the forums are down. The frontpage of Spoonohost was hacked and defaced a while back. The worst webhosting service ever? Various webhosting ratings sites claim Spoonohost has a 99.9% uptime. Don’t believe that, that’s only for their frontpage, as many people on different servers (mango, cherry) have experienced long periods of downtime. I’ve had countless outtages. In fact I just signed up for SiteUpTime.com. You can view the statistics for crushed-core at spoonohost.com here.

To put the icing on the cake? People had their credit card details comprimised as a result of various short-comings with their secure payment system. In short (if they ever come back online) do not buy any hosting from Spoonohost.com.

So, once I’ve saved up some money (it’s been an expensive week, dual quad-cores cost a lot) I’ll look to move hosts. Any ideas/recommendations? I’m thinking Media Temple, possibly overkill and a bit expensive, but I’ll have room to grow.

WordPress?

It seems like I can’t get a break. I was using 2.2, tried to get dropdown menu working on K2 0.95. Worked fine for the frontpage, yet for every subpage the header was broken. Crap. I then tried K2 0.96, then tried WP 2.2.1 with K2 0.96 and dropdown11. No dice. Plus to top it all the subpages went from broken to borked and now to a huge 404 with extra 500 for good measure. Awesome. Time to flatten completely and have a go from scratch.

Edit: All back to normal (hopefully). Strange things had happened to .htaccess. Which doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, I changed nothing about the structure of posts yet somehow that file changed and completely borked the system. Lots of deleting, uploading, head-scratching and hair pulling later and I realise one 700 byte file just wasted a lot of my time.

GTA: IV

GTA:IV

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Trailer 2: ‘Looking for that Special Someone’. Coming 28/6/07.

I really should get a PS3 soon.

Give Me a Boost

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Something Awful goon French Canadian created this awesome car themed T-shirt design, entitled ‘Give Me a Boost’. It was on threadless, where it received over 2500 votes…with an average rating of 2.1. Well most members of threadless wouldn’t know a classy design if it slapped them in the face, so in roughly 2 months the T-shirts should be available from another goon who will be printing them. More details to follow.

Just Humans

JustHumans.com. It’s one of those things you wish you’d thought of first. Just Humans solves the age old problem of form spam. Whereas most solutions require you to try and decipher mixed letters and numbers overlaid on a dodgy background, Just Humans is different. To submit your comment it asks you to click on a certain picture. The creator, Anders Brownworth, puts it forth in slightly better terms;

Click the duck to continue:

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To a computer, all of these images are just numbers representing colored pixels but a human can easily recognize the duck within the group. When the user clicks the correct image, the form is submitted. This simple test eliminates the vast majority of form spam without being unnecessarily hard on users.

How simple can you get?! No typing characters into a box, just click to submit. Why didn’t anybody do it before? Plus look at the puppy, how cute.

Another Redesign?!

Yet another goddamn redesign. Why? Well I’m trying something different. I’ve moved away from a purely portfolio orientated website. I had to face it, a portfolio site is useful, but I wasn’t making full use of it’s potential. So instead I’m changing diresction. I’m trying to share my knowledge and written guides for anything tech related. I’m also trying to build a community, repeat visitors are a good thing. I’m in the process of implementing a commenting system, but that will probably be rolled out when I think there’s enough traffic and demand. Look out soon for software and hardware reviews for both PCs and Macs. Game reviews and news for consoles. Tips, tricks and anything in-between.

Redesign v4

What’s changed? Well the layout for starters. Again. Yes, say hello to version 4. It all came about when a friend asked me to design a website for him. At the end I looked at it and thought, “That’s exactly how I want mine to look”. So the website has gone through another change. Still, a lot more development to go. A few problems and niggly issues with the gallery software to be ironed out. Need to complete my portfolio, which is up for review next week.

Live, finally

So the website is finally completely live. Good thing on one hand as I promised myself I would get this up and running before Christmas. It’s also a bad thing as my first university project is due for critique on Monday. I spent all day doing what exactly? God knows. I don’t even know where all the time went this week. I am going to have to improve time-management a bit.