Posted by mbos on Jul 2, 2009 in
General,
Recommendations 
SupportDetails.com
I was directed to this site from a newsletter I get from SitePoint.com (@sitepointdotcom). It really is a simple and fantastic resource for getting the browser details from your customers/clients. Whenever they report a problem with viewing a website or an online application, this website makes it ridiculously simple to gather critical customer data about their O/S and browser.
The screenshot on the left shows the type of information you will be able to gather. Click the image to view full size.
I know that this will be a very helpful resource to us, and should be to all designers/developers out there who need a quick way to gather this information. It sure beats guiding an individual over the phone or email on how to check for all of this!
Check them out at SupportDetails.com
Tags: recommend, stats, support
Posted by mbos on Jul 2, 2009 in
General,
News I went to Google Apps today to set up an account for one of our products. To my surprise, the free version of Google Apps no longer seemed to exist. We have been using Google Apps to host our domain email for years. Now, when you visit Google Apps you only have the option to sign up for their Premier service, at $50 per user per year. There was no mention made at all for the standard edition option that we are currently using.
After doing a specific search for “google apps standard edition”, I did find the following page where you can still sign up for the free “Standard” version of Google Apps. http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/group/index.html
I am a bit concerned however, about this change. How will Google go forward in the future in regards to existing free users? Will there come a point where they will simply force users to upgrade to the paid “Premier” version? Unfortunately, many of us have become extremely dependent upon using Google services in many areas of our business. Google did put out a blog post in January regarding the limitations now imposed on the Standard version: http://googleenterprise.blogspot.com/2009/01/serving-businesses-better-with-google.html
Now, obviously I don’t have a problem with paying for certain web services. We charge for our products after all. The issue I have here, is that they are misleading people into believing that no free version exists. On the main Google Apps sign up page, there is no option for the Standard version, and nowhere do they say there is a version for acounts with <50 users. This is deceptive, and incredibly unfair. Better that they just came out and honestly say that they no longer want to provide a free service.
Tags: gmail, google, google apps
Posted by mbos on Jul 2, 2009 in
General I have a bad habit of tinkering with my blog here and there. Adding in new features, checking out new plugins and so forth. Well, last week, this came back to bite me.
I had input some code that would make “related” posts appear on each post page. All of a sudden, the entire blog went blank. I couldn’t access the admin panel, nor view the blog at all! To compound matters, this occured at the precise moment when our database servers suffered some response issues. So all of our sites were down for a few minutes.
Of course, finding out the the servers were having issues, I assumed that was the problem. A few minutes later, after the server issue was resolved and all of our sites were back up and running, I went back in to continue work on the blog. Everything for the blog was still blank! I tried re-updating, uploading all of the files from the source again, to no avail.
I went into our theme folder under wp-content/theme/ and removed the code I had input from the functions.php file, and the blog returned. So did the admin panel. Then today, I came in to write a post, and found that my admin panel had disappeared again! Doing another quick search, I found that if your functions.php page has any empty lines at top or bottom, this will occur. I went in to check the file, and sure enough there was a blank line at the end of it. I removed the offending line, uploaded and voila! The admin panel returned.
Now, luckily this was a relatively easy fix for us, because we are pretty comfortable in modifying php files. However, how would this impact a user who has no clue about how to do this, or even what any of this means? It seems to me there should be some code somewhere in WP that tells the system to ignore empty lines….seeing that it causes such a problem.
Tags: blank page, disappeared, empty page, wordpress
