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Month: September 2009

Bouncing Emails – Some Stats

September 25, 2009
3 Comments

Well, yesterday at work we launched Manga High’s Educational Maths Games and we were featured on Radio 4’s “Today” show (6.6million listeners), the Guardian newspaper (0.35million paper readers) and Guardian website (25million uniques per month) and Channel 4’s “News at Noon” (around 1million viewers) and apart from a 3.5hour “outage” between 7.30 (Today show’s broadcast time) and 11am when the site was under terrific load, things went well and we had a very very high number of registrations and visitors.

However, we did have a number of incorrect email addresses entered into the system which caused bouncebacks the the stats were quite interesting:
* We had 1 bounce back from Yahoo
* We had 6 bounce backs from Hotmail
* We had 1 bounce back from Gmail (disabled account)
* We had 3 other bounce back – each from a different domain name
* We had 5 people who entered an incorrect domain name (which didn’t even look like Yahoo/Hotmails/Gmails domains).

I wonder what this indicates – that you are more likely to get people who cannot enter their email address correctly from Hotmail?….

Bad Ideas – 3 in 3 days!

September 17, 2009
Comments closed

My first bad idea was on Tuesday when we all (at work) had a glass of wine to celebrate moving to the new office. Not such a bad idea – until after I took my sleeping pills (yep, I’m having trouble sleeping and had forgotten I was taking them when I had the wine). Sleeping pills + alcohol is a very very bad idea – my partner said that I was “vibrating” during the night, couldn’t stand up straight and I was disorientated most of Wednesday.

My second bad idea was leaving the pub for the celebrations when I did (after the glass of wine, I was on orange juice). It was absolutely pouring down with rain for the 5 minutes or so it took me to get to the tube, and 30 minutes later when I got home I was still drenched.

My third, and so far, final bad idea was this morning. I thought I’d save myself a walk from Euston Square tube station to work by changing tube lines and getting off at Goodge Street station. Silly bad idea. I had to change at Kings Cross station, up a flight of steps across and down to the southern-bound Northern Line – where I had to change again at Euston for the southern-bound Northern Line (as it branches at Euston) which involved me going up 2 escalators, across, down, across down another escalator to end up at the opposite end of the same platform. Up 2 escalators again, across and down 2 got me to the correct southern Northern line. I then exited at Goodge Street station and, seeing the lifts were very crowded, decided to walk up the steps. 139 steps later, I was even more out of breath and sweating then I was. Lovely!

Anyway, I am beginning to get a little bit of free time back after work so I should be able to resume blogging and twittering in a few days! Woot!

Techy: Find and replace on Linux excluding SVN folders

September 7, 2009
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Just another snippet aid to memory, this find and replace (using perl) uses Linux’s find’s “prune” syntax to “prune” the path before it to avoid doing and search and replace on .svn folders:

find -path '*/.svn' -prune -o -type f -exec /usr/bin/perl -pi -e "s/ORIGINAL/NEW/g" {} \;

Techy: Internet Explorer 8, Reload Rendering Issues – Fixed!

September 4, 2009
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I’ve just had a very very irritating time trying to debug a web page. It would load correctly into Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 8 and display/render correctly, but then when the page was reloaded or refreshed, it would be rendered incorrectly with a few sections offset and just generally looking wrong.

Thanks to a lot of search and trying different keywords, I found the IE8 Inconsistent Rendering when Reloading post on StackOverflow which said it was a problem with I.E. 8 and CompanionJS and/or DebugBar. Removing both of them (via the Control Panel->Add/Remove Programs / Uninstall Programs section) allowed the site to start working correctly.

Woopie!

This keyword rich post was created to try and help any other people suffering from the same Internet Explorer Page Rendering Incorrectly Upon Reload issue as I had from losing as much hair as I did!