Late mail: Gmail was down
Most Gmail users around the globe have commented already on Gmail being down for a few hours.
Apparently Twitter was flooded with Gmail comments and on Google itself the system failure was one of the most searched terms over that period.
For Australians, or me at least, it was only a minor inconvenience. I noticed the problem when I arrived at work about 7.15am and the service was restored within half an hour.
The failure must have been overnight.
Traffic surge to 6561 visitors
I thought there was something wrong today when I checked the Google Analytics stats for The Border Watch website.
I’ve been quite pleased with the site’s traffic growth, but wasn’t expecting today’s surge to more than 6500 unique visitors. Read more
Wordpress 2.6 RC1
I’m using Wordpress 2.6 Release Candidate 1. A new feature is the ability to add image captions.
I got this to work, but the styling was non-existent and I’m not smart enough with CSS to code it myself, so I might have to wait until it comes up as an issue with the theme designer.
In the meantime, I discovered the Image Caption plugin which does the job, transforming “alt” tags into captions. Read more
Pre-paid mobile phone rip-off
The Herald-Sun today reports that pre-paid mobile phone customers are spending up to $1 billion a year on phone calls they never make.
“Millions of mobile owners who pay upfront for their service allow call credits to expire,” the paper says.
Pre-paid phones make up more than half the national mobile phone market. Read more
iPhone not such a big deal
The introduction of the iPhone to Australia on Friday was a marketing success for Apple. They created a real buzz and a perception the product was so sought after you’d be lucky to get one.
That turned out to be the case. Whether it’s true, or whether release numbers were deliberately restricted, I can’t be sure.
There were none for sale in Mount Gambier, apparently. In Melbourne, only selected stores were stocking them. Some people queued for hours to get one. Read more
Identi.ca: Unique or clone?
I was never a big Tweeter, but found the concept strangely compelling. There are many people ranting on the web about service disruptions, but I never used it enough to be troubled.
Nevertheless, I like to try new things and stumbled across Identi.ca yesterday and set up an account with the short, early-adopter user name of mjg.
The service is Open Source and I like the fact I can login with openID. There is the promise of things to come in terms of integration and updates, such as SMS, Facebook and WordPress.
There is a good in-depth discussion here.
Three underrated WordPress plugins
John Lamansky asked WordPress bloggers to name three underrated plugins and Jeff Chandler picked up the idea at Weblog Tools Collection.
I mentioned two plugins at John’s site which I don’t think get as much attention as they deserve.
1) Javascript in posts: WordPress allows Javascript in php files and sidebar widgets, but not in posts. This plugin fixes that.
2) Exclude pages: This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus. And I will add:
3) My page order: Saves a lot of time if you want pages to appear in alphabetical order. It gives you control over how pages are displayed in menus.
Service disruption
For the first time in about three years I’ve been with Site5 there have been significant service disruptions to my web hosting.
This site and my others have been down for most of the past 48 hours.
Tuesday is usually one of my best for visits on this site, but numbers were down 45 percent his week compared with last week.
Apologies to anyone who was locked out on trying to visit here in the past two days.
The Border Watch website
I’m putting the finishing touches to a new dynamic website for The Border Watch. It’s my modification of the Revolution News WordPress theme. Read more
Another webmail service goes
I logged into Gigya webmail tonight. I’ve always liked its clean, open layout and speed of operation. It also has lots of other sharing features and things I never used.
On logging in I was greeted with this announcement:
Note: the Gigya webmail service will be discontinued permanently on June 15th. We recommend that you forward any email containing important contacts or content to another email service of yours by July 15th. We are sorry for the inconvenience.
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