All of a sudden, I can’t visit any website, but I can still use my Skype! Checking the office computer, I discover it’s not a simple computer issue. A quick chat with a colleague in Chicago reveals it’s happening to him too. So much for think a simple router reset will do the trick. Luckily after about 30 minutes, I can at least do a Google search for Comcast outage and the live twitter results confirm my suspicions; a Comcast DNS outage in the Midwest. A quick switch of my computer setting to the OpenDNS servers, and I’m back up and running in seconds.
Just five days after my last post on Dec. 3rd annoucing my father’s passing, we lost my father-in-law suddenly. The past few months have been a whirlwind of shock and sorrow. The holidays were difficult and my sons have made it past their birthdays without their Grandpas, although not without lots of tears.
But as we are well into the new year, things are looking brighter. I am pleased to say that I am incredibly happy at my new job with Platinum Innovation Group. I have decided that I will not be accepting any new clients from this point forward. I look forward to continuing to serve my current clients.
I just want to take a moment to thank everyone for their patience these past few weeks. As many of you already know, my father passed away on November 12th. It has been a difficult time since and many work related tasks have had to be pushed aside to focus on the family issues at hand. Your patience is such a gift to me and has helped me greatly. While work is still a bit behind schedule, things are slowly returning to normal.
So, thank you to everyone for your patience. I appreciate it more than words can express.
hi·a·tus: a period when something (as a program or activity) is suspended or interrupted.1
It has been my pleasure to serve the web development needs of my customers for the past eight years. So it is with a heavy heart that I must announce that I will be taking a hiatus from full time freelance development for an undetermined amount of time.
Pressing family issues, including the fast declining health of my terminally ill father, have prompted this difficult decision. To my current clients, I am still available to support your needs, however requests for new projects will be handled on a case by case basis. To new potential clients, I’d be happy to discuss your website development needs and will accept new projects as time allows.
Work will be handled in the following order of priority:
Current clients’ ongoing support of existing work
Current clients’ new work requests
New clients referred by current clients
New clients not referred by a current client
Phone based support will be limited, so I’d like to request that everyone use email to contact me.
Thank you to each and every client I’ve worked with over the years. I look forward to serving you for many years to come. I am unable to predict at this time when I will be able to return to full time freelancing, however it is my strong desire to do so.
A fellow entrepreneur and dear friend recently came across this video. The statistics of social networking, such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc, is astounding. Every business should seriously consider how their marketing plans accomodate the way their customers are using the internet and how social media can be utilized to grow the customer relationship. Take a look at the video.
BuddyPress has officially hit version 1.0. BuddyPress is a collection of components and plugins for the WordPress MU platform that turns your MU installation into a full fledged social network. I’ve been watching the development of this project for some time now and I’m excited about the possibilities for niche networks.
One of the great advantages to using BuddyPress is that, as the owner of the site, you control the data and you make the rules! How many people are truly happy to create a “group” on sites like facebook, knowing that you have to agree to their very broad terms of use and what they can do with your information?
There’s a whole new world of possibilities with BuddyPress and WordPress MU. A gallery component is in the works and should be available later this year, giving it what I would consider an essential piece of the social network platform. Until the gallery is ready, I’ll be implementing BuddyPress on a couple of my own sites to immerse myself in it’s capabilities. I’m looking forward to helping my clients use BuddyPress for their web marketing strategies.
The new Drag ‘n’ Drop Free website builder and hosting service needs some nice templates to offer it’s users. So the company behind this great free service, LiveAps, is running a contest through the end of April and has $2000 in prize money up for grabs! LiveAps states,
“We need to offer some templates to get people started, and we’re looking for some fresh ideas. So for this coming month we’re accepting links to sites built using MyDragNDrop, and on the 30th April our internal panel will select the best 10 from each category, and post them here for public voting for a week.”
So get your digital pencils ready and start designing! Visit www.liveapsblog.com for all the details. While you’re there, be sure to sign up for your free My Drag’n'Drop account and see what the free website builder and free hosting is all about.
I’ve been working with several business associates across the globe on a truly FREE drag and drop website builder and I’m proud to share the news that My Drag ‘n’ Drop has recently launched and is now available to everyone! Paul, the company founder, had this to say on launch day,
Well after 30 months, around 7,000 hours of my time, sometimes stepping forward then taking larger ones back, the day has come to open the doors to our drag’n’drop publishing tools and hosting.
Admittedly we’re still in beta and ironing out the kinks, but we see no reason now why you shouldn’t have access to our product as it is stable enough now to build functional websites.
So, if you’re looking for an easy website building solution for your personal or business site, head on over to mydragndrop.com/ to get your free account. Company news and information can be found at liveaps.com.
I ran into an issue I’d never experienced before and thought I’d share this new snippet of knowledge with you. I was installing WordPress on a client’s Godaddy Economy Hosting and after changing the permalink settings to a more appealing format, which is usually the first thing I do when installing WordPress, I discovered that the new urls didn’t work. The reason this caught me by surprise is that most of the clients I work with have used the Godaddy Deluxe Hosting which doesn’t present this problem.
A quick Google search brought me to Zac Vineyard’s Blog, which provided the exact answer I was looking for. With the Godaddy Economy Hosting, the .htaccess configurations are updated on the server every hour, on the hour. So, I simply waited until five minutes past the hour and, true to Zac’s advice, the permalinks began to work.
It appears that many people believe that mod_rewrite doesn’t work with the Godaddy Economy Hosting and are quick to upgrade to the Deluxe package. But before jumping the gun, take a look at your clock and wait until a few minutes past the next hour to check your .haccess changes.
“WordPress.tv is Your Visual Resource for All Things WordPress” says the folks over at Automattic. Today, they launched a new website chock full of video tutorials and resources for using your WordPress blog site. The videos cover such topics as writing and publishing a post, adding pages, and setting your post to publish at a later date. The site promises to add new videos and resources on a regular basis, so WordPress.tv should quickly become a valuable resource for any WordPress blog owner.
