Portfolioso.com Blog

Some More Downtime

I have no idea what happend before around 2PM today. This site was fine then all of a sudden it was down for at least an hour (maybe more). Then, I tried to get a server status from my hosting company’s website and their site was down. Next, I tried emailing them and their mail servers were down so the email wouldn’t go through. Finally, I tried looking at the support forums where they post server issues and that server is still not up. I know it went out around 2PM but I have no idea when it came back.

Anyway, I emailed tech support. They sent back a disgustingly ungramatical email which is very unlike them, because their support is usually great. I make a lot of typos, but this is professional, they should at least check it over. Get ready to count the typos (I’ve made them bold):

Hello, We are currently having a network issue with some of our servres that are located in some of our old datacenter space in the the Northeastern US, this should be resolved soon within 1-2 hours. Thank you for your patience regarding this matter.

Also last night and early this morning we had to performe some maintence on the
domain on server, in an effort to provide better and faster
support in the future for our customers. We are currently up and running. -Erik

Hahaha… I just laughed.

Aha! An easy way to update

Posting news on this site is now ten times easier thanks to Jason for telling me about Coranto, a nice cgi and perl script that acts as a blogger tool. All I have to do is login and fill in a few text boxes and it automatically updates the news, thanks to my great host having SSI. Anyway, It saves me time from manually editing the html every time I wanted to update.

What does this mean to the people viewing this site? Well nothing major. As a matter of fact, you’re reading a post that has been added by this new system right now. Looks the same, right? Yeah, pretty much. One noticeable minor differences: The time of the post will be automatically added. Anyway, that’s all.

New! Image Gallery

I was sick of the stupid way I had images on this site. It was a dumb apache directory listing of them. Why was this bad? Well, if you clicked on the image, it would load the full size high resolution image. This is slow, especially for you fools with dialup. Therefore, I got a nice php script to automatically generate an image gallery. Instead of loading the whole image, it loads an automatically generated thumbnail of it. This is quicker to load and you can see the image before you click it to enlarge it.

It is split into separate categories, each with its own gallery. Check it out over here. That’s some good shit.

Flash Intro to Portfolioso.com

Well, John made an awesome flash intro! One thing I wanted to learn is flash animation, but Flash MX is really complicated. So John posts on my forums that he was willing to make a flash intro and I was like “Sure knock yourself out.” I don’t think I’ll be using it as an intro yet because it is 3 megabytes and that would kill my bandwidth every time the 10 regulars look at this site 100 times a day, plus it would be slow for dialup people. Enough blabbering.

Auto Generated What’s Playing Image

Not that anyone cares, but I added an auto updating image that shows you what I’m currently listening to on Winamp. It is a picture of the compact Winamp bar (go figure). This image is located on the bottom of my main page, in case you’re interested. I had a real hard time getting the stupid php scripts to work with the damn Winamp plugin and it was really annoying. First thing I had to change was the font because it was loopy and hard to read.

It also messed up the page layout for those with 800×600 resolution, so I had to change the footer a little. (Damn 800×600 resolution should be banned because it sucks). But everything is okay now and works perfectly… Oh yeah, when it’s off, the time of the song will say seven seconds… Yeah its weird but whatever.