March 16th, 2012
Follow up to my review of NowYo.com
I reached out to the new owner of the domain I had supposedly purchased on 3/9 from NowYo.com, who informed me that he purchased it on 3/14.
So to recap. They sold me the domain on 3/9 for $300.
Then on 3/14 they sold it again for $350 to someone else.
Must be nice to be in a business where you can operate like this. No – I was not beaten to the punch. They just got a better offer.
I could understand if they sold it first thing Monday morning, but my payment arrived to them on Friday at 4:30pm, then they sold it the Wednesday after. Hard to trust a company that manages themselves like this.
If you’re thinking of buying a domain for NowYo.com – Buyer Beware!
March 16th, 2012
NowYo.com is a company based in Cincinnati Ohio that resells domain names. Normally I do not buy domains from resellers, but they approached me with a domain I was interested in and I decided to give it a shot. Here follows my review of the domain reseller NowYo.com
Short story – Poor customer service experience. Do not use Now Yo for your domain name purchase needs. Even if you pay the invoice as promptly as humanly possible – you’ll probably not get what you ordered.
I called their office after receiving their solicitation via email. I spoke to Ryan who agreed to sell me the domain for a fair price and promptly sent me a PayPal invoice. I paid the invoice within 10 minutes and was informed that I would receive instructions on how to retrieve my purchased domain within 24 hours.
Things got busy and a week went by with no communication from them. I called to see what was up, after my attempts to contact them through their website’s contact form proved unsuccessful. I was treated like a alien, as if they’d never heard from me before (despite getting the same person, and having an invoice # from them) – and was told that ‘we got a lot of action on that’ – and ‘someone beat you to it’ – ‘we sold it yesterday’ (despite me buying it a week previous).
I suspect they got a better offer on the domain after I paid and took it. It’s charlatans like these that make a bad name for the domain reselling business. I noticed that the first time I visited their site to check the price of the domain it was $375, then I checked from another computer and it said ‘Offer’. When I called without me even pressing they offered it to me for $300.
OK, so if somebody truly beat me to it – you have no procedure in place to refund money you’ve accepted from others for the same goods?
Who knows how long NowYo.com would have kept my money had I not called. They are not running a good business and I cannot recommend them to anyone. Feel free to contact me if you’ve had similar issues. In the end they hung up on me, so I don’t think their too serious about keeping customers happy.
That concludes my review and vent of NowYo.com, now back to your regular programming…
UPDATE: See what I find when I contact the new owner.
February 21st, 2012
Taxonomy Templates allows user selection of a theme’s available taxonomy templates, much like how pages can select their template. If you’ve ever wanted to style many categories differently, it can quickly get tedious making copies of templates and changing file names to match slugs or id’s. Lacking a term meta data store, this plugin stores the selected templates in the options table.
With the plugin installed, and available templates in the theme, the user can select the desired template on the Edit Category/Tag/Taxonomy page:
On the theme side a comment is added to the top of the template to identify it:
/*
Taxonomy Template Name: SMPR
*/
UPDATE: Now available in plugin repository
September 1st, 2011
I’ve wanted to do this for a long time, and finally did. I took the website monitoring script I’ve used for awhile and turned it into a WordPress plugin. Tyrone the WP Watchdog is now available in the WordPress plugin repository.
Tyrone turns a WordPress install into a monitoring tool, which allows you to keep tabs on all the installations you’re responsible for. This is designed for people who are managing say 20 or more installations of WordPress. Tyrone will sniff out your sites and try and determine the version and flag those that are not up to date. He can also look for known spam terms, or whatever you like.
I’m actively using and developing the plugin, and appreciate constructive feedback. A more detailed write up and screenshots will follow soon.
August 23rd, 2011
This was my first pilgrimage to the annual WordCamp San Francisco. 3 days of WordPress heaven. Sunday I enjoyed volunteering at the ‘Happiness Bar’, helping people with their WordPress problems. Saw some interesting stuff. Great speakers, great venue and crowd.
March 10th, 2011
One of my favorite, and most used plugins is — Automatic WordPress Backup by Dan Coulter under commission by Web Design Company.
It backs up your entire site (database, themes, plugins, uploads, settings) and then sends it off to Amazon S3′s low cost industrial strength storage.
You can set it to run automatically or trigger it manually as you like. It will even clean up old backups.
It does not support multi-site yet – but hopefully it will soon.
One note of caution – the automated backup jobs are triggered by wp_cron. This can be problematic for low traffic sites. You may wish to setup a cron job to visit your site at regular intervals to insure that wp_cron gets triggered regularly.
Thanks Dan and Mel!
Download WordPress Backup
October 22nd, 2009
Recently, a client wanted just 1 jumbo mailbox for their domain, larger than what I can provide on my hosting platform. Google Apps Enterprise seemed like the perfect fit. 25 Gigs for a reasonable price on the familiar and popular Gmail platform. Perfect right… yes, until you have a question or need support.
Google’s monolith provides no phone number for support, just online forms where you fire your query off and hope for a timely response or resolution.
It has taken Google Enterprise support – 3 weeks to address my issue. That’s right 3 weeks to troubleshoot an email delivery issue. This is the poorest of poor support/service. For a paid service this is unacceptable.
Bottom line, don’t host anything other than personal email with Google Apps. They are not up to the task when it comes to supporting users who depend on reliable email. There are a ton of reputable hosting companies that do excellent email hosting and -gasp- actually have a phone number you can call for support when things go wrong.
Oh and the best part is the issue still isn’t solved and I must continue waiting for replies to emails.
</rant>
September 16th, 2009
ALTER TABLE `tablename` AUTO_INCREMENT =0
Will reset the auto_increment to the lowest value in the table.
September 11th, 2009
Here’s a nifty little application that saves you from the drudgery of interfacing with the terminal on your Mac to show hidden files. Sure you can open Terminal and enter:
defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES
and then:
killall FINDER
Enter again.
However, you can drag this app to your dock and do this with just a few clicks. For those of us that need to locate .htaccess files, but don’t want to look at .DS_Store files all day – this is a great productivity enhancer.
“If you are a webmaster, software developer, or advanced user, you may find yourself having to frequently switch between SHOW ALL FILES and HIDE HIDDEN FILES on your Mac. This can be done with a few lines in UNIX… but why not save yourself the time and use this free desktop application.”
http://gotoes.org/sales/ShowHiddenFilesMacOSX/How_To_Show_Hidden_Files.php
September 10th, 2009
This is a great add-on for Firefox which makes organizing many tabs a breeze. If you’re like me sometimes you have 30 tabs open. With this installed you can display your tabs as a nested list on the left or right.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890
May 6th, 2009
As previously mentioned here – I have a client who is unfortunate enough to have 30+ sites hosted on Media Temple’s Grid Service (GS).
This outage began Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 7:35 pm EST, so right now that’s 39 HOURS of DOWNTIME!
Freakin’ unbelievable. I reccommend MOSSO – tell them jwhelan sent you for a sweet discount on your first month.
May 5th, 2009
For $20 a month, why anyone expects different I’ll never know. But now for the second time in as many months, Media Temple has completely crapped out. I’m fortunate not to have any eggs in their basket, but have a client who’s hosted there.
mt Media Temple » Weblog » #754 gs Grid-Service Cluster.02 Web availability.
Their last big outage in March was 36+ hours for many customers. This outage now going on well over 12 hours. Sites don’t load and return 403 errors.
I wonder how many more of these outages MT can have before there’s no customers left.
Update : Going on 24 hours, my client’s sites are still down. We’re migrating them as fast as possible, and he’ll learn from this and ditch Media Temple like a hot stinky potato.
Another interesting post: http://mtcustomers.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/cluster-2-back-customer-care-migration-recap/
