Developing eWrite

The past few days have been particularly tough. I’ve been working on a new clients email newsletter making sure they can get their monthly newsletter into their recipients inboxes.

The clients site is hosted with Register365.  One of the measures to make sure the email gets through is to add an SPF record. To do this I need to update the DNS settings on the clients site. I wanted to search Register365 support to see if I could do this.

Just when I need it most, the support section of Register365 was offline and still is.

Register365's "Support"

Using Google Cache, I can see what it should look like and that it was at least online on November 1^st when Google cached it. Luckily I have Yell if it changes, which is going to send me an email when the site is back online.

Register365 Support on Google's Cache

I ranted about this on Twitter on Friday evening and I was very impressed when I received a message from Stephen McCarron, managing director of Hosting365 asking if he could be of any assistance. Unfortunately Stephen couldn’t help, but I was reminded yet again how Twitter can be a valuable business resource. Thanks for contacting me Stephen.

Blacknight have been the complete opposite to Register365. I signed up to a VPS account allowing me to have a static IP address, set up reverse DNS and more. I talked to several members of Blacknight at different times using their Live Chat and email and every time I was answered promptly and came away a happy customer.

To further prevent me from doing any productive work the last few days, my ISP has been terribly slow to update their DNS records. I pointed a domain name to the new VPS account. Within hours the site was running for anyone I asked to look but when looking at the domain name from my office it still hadn’t updated for 4 days despite flushing my local DNS and resetting the router a couple of times.

So for a frustrating few days when I really needed things to work my own ISP and Register365 failed me. If it wasn’t for Blacknight, their services and staff I’d be completely fecked and I would have most likely lost a valued customer. Thank you Blacknight.

The Tuesday push is part of a coordinated effort to spread the work of the Irish tech community.

This week, the Tuesday push is Pix.ie by Marcus Mac Innes.

A few months ago I asked a few contacts on Twitter if they could recommend a good web app for storing photos, several recommended pix.ie.

When using pix.ie, there are plenty of small features that I really like, making it far less clucky than similar apps I’ve used before.

• When I go to upload a few photos, I can upload several at once using only 1 browse window instead of 1 browse window per image. It uploads them all in an instant.
• When browsing through albums, there’s a cool little effect. When hovering the mouse over an album, the images in the album slide out and surround the album so you can get a glimpse of what’s inside.
• On the social side, You can allow your albums and images to be visible to the public. People can comment on your images and you can build up a list of friends and view their albums too.
• Pix.ie provides an RSS feed of albums and has many popular methods of bookmarking such as Digg, Redd, Google and Yahoo and several more I’ve never heard of.

Im not a photographer, nor am I the type of person to have pictures of friends and family all over the place. I use pix.ie mostly to put up an image of something, such as a screenshot of a page and give someone a short url to view it.

Its fast to load, enjoyable to use and im looking forward to checking out a few more of its features that I have yet to use.

Sign up to pix.ie now!

I’ve added the ‘Twitter Updater‘ plugin to Wordpress to post updates of new blog posts to the @ewrite twitter account. If I have it set up correctly, this blog post will trigger the first update.

I’ve turned off the option to post updates if I edit a post or save a post, I don’t think they’re very useful.

Don’t forget to follow @ewrite on Twitter!