Kalpa

I'm Karl Elliott, and these are my opinions, thoughts, ideas and more...

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Getting a little concerned as to the regularity of downtime with our otherwise totally excellent hosting...

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Looks ok. Nothing stunning graphically, but might be a really simple theme for doing the job well. December release with WP 4.1 apparently

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Multisite headaches resolved

After a week of headaches, I've finally got my INandAROUND Multisite installation back to life. 30 seconds to fix - just took a week of complex investigations to get to the bottom of it.

Index.php was - for reasons uncertain - holding a static copy of the homepage of one of the subdomains sites. So everything was always showing that site. Found a working Multisite index.php, cut and pasted it into the failed file and everything resolves everywhere perfectly ok again!

All happened after running a theme update (Themify Basic) in one theme. Why it should alter index.php as part of the update heaven only knows. But it's a scary thought for the next time I need to upgrade.

Lesson learned the hard way. Going to do better on the backup, upgrade route from now on. At least I know a lot more about how the Multisite database is structured now!

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big companies fail with their websites

I've been talking today with a new client about getting their website working well. Seems ironic then that the largest companies can't make their websites work at all well. Perhaps they should do some testing before they put their sites out into the wild.

So Virgin Mobile website won't allow you to buy a sim only. Click on buy it now and try following it through and it insists you have nothing in your basket. So gave up on that one. Not that their legal wording on the web page relates to the product on that page either. 0/10 no sale.

Asda site seems to object to any name being typed into the name field. Errors each time. No idea what format they expect a name to be written in? 0/10 again. No sale - went to Tesco instead.

And that's just today. It makes the company look stupid and shows how little human thought goes into throwing a website together. Gives the web industry a bad name too.

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Basecamp vs Huddle for a Trustee space

Combining my recent thinking here after a little play with Basecamp for the first time this afternoon.

In Trustees' Week I explored using collaboration software to make boards more effective. At VANEL we use Huddle, and there's a cost for that for 15 people (£75pa I think).

But what about Basecamp? Still a cost, but unlimited people and perhaps more flexibility? Certainly looks and works nicer. Not sure about where data is hosted (for Data Protection legislation), but worth a think for some smaller charities perhaps?

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Email routing

Playing around a lot this week routing emails via different accounts and forwarders. Getting complex and a headache, but it's for a good reason. Not sure many people I'm supporting do things this way so Im a bit wary I'm overdoing things.

But - some examples...

Most of ours and our client sites are with one host. When they go down (occasionally) any emails and forwarders in those accounts of course don't work. So extra emails outside of those accounts need to receive suitable warnings. That's two levels of email already.

We've got Google Apps & Drive, but we're not using Gmail - we use our hosted IMAP mail instead. Complexity or control?

Client websites I've built and manage can generate email noise at low level (informational), medium level (activity such as registrations, comments and so on) or high level (site down, problems to resolve). Each potentially needs email tracking and prioritisation. Lots more forwarding to forwarders etc to sort.

And finally, playing with Pushover over iPad to get the really critical notifications asap. So along with emails to route to Evernote or to IFTTT there's a lot of emails flying in different directions.

Anyone got a really good way to map all this lot?

Hoping to prove the value of all this in due course ( by way of improved productivity??).

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Chromebooks revisited

Back to looking at Chromebooks again as mobile devices. Very cheap, portable, no disc to fail, no software to manage, quick boot, work offline - all good.

Will need to see if I can get a Chromebook to work the way some of our staff will need. Looking to create a mobile account with the right Chrome setup - which will need a bit of thinking through.

Learning point 1: leave a Chromebook alone for a while and it will need a big update (read download) when you boot it up. I need to make sure I do all those updates on full wifi rather than on our mobile dongle limited capacity when we're out and about

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Basecamp on trial

New website development project starts this week. So in a live experiment I'm playing with Basecamp to track this one. It's got 60 days to prove itself to me in the free trial before I start paying, so we'll see how it goes.

Looks and feels good so far. The devil (as always) will be in the detail of how it really functions in live use.

Other alternatives like Asana do the same, but I'm even toying with the idea of WordPress multisite + P2 theme (P2 Labzip?) + plugins. That's a free option (arguably a cost for the hosting), but needs more mangement to oversee. Hoping Basecamp will be a zero management option just providing me with power.

Will be interesting when I get the client logging in and start accessing from phone and iPad etc.

Feedback to follow I guess...

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Goodbye Trustees Week

National Trustees' Week was a great experience. I was very busy with our 5 events over 5 days, and takeup was not all I hoped for. But each event generated interest, discussion and points to learn from.

Hoping now to find ways to capitalise on the good spread of the work on Trusteeship and Governance and not let this die away. It's too important to forget about, yet we're not specifically funded for it, nor do we have resources to throw at it. But we'll chip away at it and keep the momentum going.

Step 1 is simply to blog weekly now on something or other related to Trusteeship or Governance.

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When Multisite goes bad...

WordPress Multisite driving me to distraction at the moment. The site is all there & everything is working and accessible from the backend. But visit any of the sub-sites (subdomains) and everything gets redirected to a single site. So nothing is workable from the front end for users!

All started when I upgraded the theme on one site - now that site seems to be boss.

In resolving it I'm understanding more about wp-config, .htaccess, mod_rewrite, the database tables behind multisite and more. Everything is ok and correct, yet it still fails to work. Infuriating.

One of the joys of managing a self-hosted complex site with no-one else to turn to for support. Some of the informative google sites I visited turned out to old hold part of the picture (and erroneous examples), but thank you to our hosting provider (Krystal) for quickly proving to me that mod_rewrite was still functioning just fine.

So watch this space. Hopefully i'll resolve it soon...

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Small picture but astronomically significant. Rosetta mission still proving successful. Makes landing on a comet seem easy! Groundbreaking scientific moment today

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Thank you Brian Cox. Human Universe has been an excellent, inspirational series. Can't wait to watch it all again. What next?

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National Trustees' Week in November

Been very busy this week preparing for Trustees' Week starting 10th November. We're now putting on 5 trustee and governance focused events in 5 days.

Great opportunity to raise the profile of Trusteeship again locally. So many issues I hear of within boards. And so many great boards doing good work that could be even better. Always the issue that we're preaching better governance to those who are willing to listen, rather than to those who need it most.

But busy putting lots of support together for November and hoping now for a good response.

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.uk

Only just came across news about .uk domain names today. They've been available since June and depending upon various rules you might or might not have one reserved for you already. I'm going to investigate more for the domains I control. Same price as .co.uk or .org.uk as far as I can see & our host Krystal say they can sort it. Now trying to decide whether I need a .uk or not?

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Preordered my copy of Value Proposition Design. Can't wait. Follow on from the Business Canvas from years ago that I've been referring to lots. Interested to see what this one tells me. Also love the design of the book itself.

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Mailchimp and RSS

I still love RSS. One of the oldest unchanged technologies on the web and it still works well. Here's to the RSS feed!

Just this week started with an automated e-bulletin RSS fed campaign using Mailchimp. Works very well. Every week now VANEL will be circulating a news bulletin with no extra effort or intervention from me. Just pulling news via RSS from our website. Cool.

Just need to ensure our team keeps fresh news going onto the website regularly now.

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Human Universe

He's back. Brian Cox & the Human Universe. Making mind blowing science understandable. Don't miss the series. Can't wait to read the book. Please Dr Cox, can you start doing GCSE level science materials please? Still can't believe teachers today can make science anything less than amazing, but they seem to manage to bore kids still. Perhaps we need teachers to learn from the Brian Cox school of teaching?