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Day: 27 March 2003

Fun: Splish Splash, I was…

[Splish Splash]Yep, I finally got board of F— her Gently and Kikkoman and started hunting for a new Macromedia Flash animation to entertain me.

Luckily, I’m easily amused 😀 and this little animation caught my eye.

Gruntin’ n Dumpin Lil’ Dumplin’ is a little baby in a bath singing a variation of Bobby Darin’s “Splish Splash” song [Order from Amazon.co.uk] amazoncom:B000002LV4 : you know the one –

Splish Splash, I was taking a bath
Long about a Saturday night
A rub-a-dub, just relaxing in the tub
Thinking everything was all right…

But for the little baby, everything isn’t alright…

Blogging: Cache Remote

[Cache Remote]For a number of months now, I’ve been running a little script on my website to control my blog rolls. Basically, a blog roll is a list of sites that I read regularly (they appear on the right hand side of the blog by the way) and “updates” on them are indicate (in my case with bold text and stars).

However, to ensure the blog rolls stay up to date, I use a service called blogrolling which provides a Javascript or PHP file for you to include in your site and will, therefore, display a list of recently updated blogs of your choosing. But what happens if you get nearly 600 visitors a day a day – that mean every time somebody reads your blog, they’ve then get to fetch the extra file from blogrolling and use up their bandwidth (which, as the owner of blogrolling realised can be quite a lot with popular blogs). Therefore, in the sake of conserving bandwidth, I’ve written a PHP script called “cacheremote” which will help take the load off the remote server.

Oh – and the script has an added bonus. If, when it comes to “refresh time”, the blogrolling server is unavailable for any reason, then your blogroll will still be displayed!

Read on for details and to download it… (currently cacheremote v0.05)

Guess That Movie: XLIII: X Men

[Guess That Movie 43]Well, Kymberlie again rushed in and managed to recognise Guess That Movie 42 as being taken from the extremely funny “SpaceBalls” movie amazoncom:0792844890 [Order from Amazon.co.uk] : I can’t remember if 5 minutes from posting is a new “guess record”, but I’ll take a look once I update the high score table and double-check if Kymberlies received her prize yet (I did send it to her, but Amazon’s been having some problems dispatching the e-certificate – but since it’s a technical problem, neither I nor their customer service department can cancel, change or correct the order and all I get is an “Unable to process order, please login to correct” message from their automated bots 🙁 ).

Anyway, here’s image 43 (I can’t believe I let image 42 go without a reference to Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy though, but at least it did have a “comedy/space” feel to it – admittedly unintentionally) – have a guess and let me know which movie you think it’s from…

“Richy’s blog,
ooh ohh
Richy’s blog

go Richy go
go Richy go

Richy’s blog,
ooh ohh
Richy’s blog”

(slightly harder to recognise cartoon theme tune, but the middle bit should give it away- no extra points for recognising it though, but if you want to guess, feel free 🙂 )
A: X Men [Order from Amazon.co.uk] amazoncom:B00003CX8J . Correctly guessed by NetRngr

Personal: Email, Email and Sleep

EmailBlarg and flibblepenguinahoy (hello to all of you who found this blog through those keywords – yep, the email you received is probably from the same person, and talk about cryptic comments 🙂 ). Today’s been “one of those days” where I had a few major projects to work on (2 clients need websites designing, I’m still working on automating the Nominet DNS registrations and I’m just trying a few things with a shopping cart package), but I spent all day (and I wish I was kidding) just responding to emails and sales calls – I’m normally just search engine optimising/tech support, but some of our sales team have been off the past two days so I had to chip in.

I think I’ve managed to get a couple of sales sorted for our lower-end search engine optimisation service, maybe two e-commerce shopping cart customers and maybe even a reseller signed up (we work with a number of web design orientated companies who then outsource/resell their search engine placement and promotion services to us: we get customers without the hassle of having to contact each one and bill them individually – it’s slightly cheaper for us to send one monthly bill to one company that we know is a ‘good payer’ then 100 smaller bills to 100 customers and then having to check they have all paid – and we pass this discount on), and then I had some tech support issues to work out…

Blogging: Neil Offline

Neil TurnerAs some of you may have already noticed, fellow ODP editor Neil Turner‘s (aka totalxsive) blog is currently offline. I was aware he was having problems with people spamming his comments (I could tell by reading comments people had left that there were a couple of rather immature people with too much time on their hands) – but it seems it escalated into a flood attack resulting in his ISP (Freedom2Surf) taking the site offline – he’s tried contacting them, but no response after 36 hours! I’m disappointed if I (or another member of our technical team) don’t respond to a technical queries on website hosting business within 6 hours (that’s 6 hours full stop – not just “working hours”, after all – the internet doesn’t close down at 5pm, so why should your site?)

Neil’s currently looking for alternative hosting (I’ve recommended our hosting service as I know how good the tech support is and how reliable the servers are – I would move my own sites to them, but I’m a massive bandwidth hog and use up around 1.5Gb of traffic a week – that’s around 6Gb a month – on my various sites and I’m expecting that to return to normal levels of around 2-3Gb per week after the Iraqi war finishes).

Anyway, Neil’s got people looking to trace the person that spammed his account (and, yep, if whoever you are is reading this – Neil DOES know where you live and is contacting the relevant people), but has said in an email to me > Only downer is that I’ve probably lost a whole bulk of entries – my last backup was about a month ago <

Whether Neil will be bringing back his blog (which is one of the few that started me on my blogging adventure) at the same URL or reference to him as an individual, I don’t know, but whoever caused him this inconvenience lacks basic netiquette and intelligence – if you’ve got nothing nice to say, don’t say it at all!

Hopefully Neil should be back at the weekend…