Category Archives: The Internet

Unable to download podcast

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I manage a podcast feed for my church, and recently had a problem where I was unable to download episodes using the iOS Podcast app on my iPhone.  The podcast would download OK on other Android devices, and it would stream on my iPhone if I tapped the play icon, but if I selected “Download Episode” then the download would appear to happen, but then at the end a message would pop up saying “Unable to download podcast”, with a “Retry” and a “Done” button.

Googling this problem shows that other people have experienced similar issues, but no amount of unsubscribing, deleting, restarting, rebooting, or switching to airplane mode would fix the problem.

In the end I discovered that the problem was due to a misconfiguration in the XML file for the podcast feed. In the <channel> section of the XML file there is an <itunes:image> tag where you can put the URL of an image. I discovered that this tag was pointing to an invalid URL, to a server that I had used several years ago. After setting the tag to a valid URL, and refreshing the feed in the iOS podcast app, I was able to download episodes.

 

Not much of a Jewel

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LambtonIn Google Maps, if you search for a suburb name, as well as the map result the page will show a photo from the suburb, which presumably is auto-selected by the Google-fairy-bots according to some secret algorithm. Mostly this works. For example for “Lambton NSW” you get a nice photo of Lambton Park and the rotunda.

But search for “Jewells NSW” and you get … a burnt out car and assorted rubbish on a beach track. The Google-fairy-bots might need a bit of help on this one.

Jewells

NewJewellsUpdate 23 Jan 2016

Searching for Jewells now shows someone’s driveway. A step up from a burnt out wreck, but not exactly showcasing the suburb.

Firefox 41 and the New Tab override

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firefoxFor years Firefox has been my preferred browser. When I open a new tab I like to have it open to a custom page on my local drive rather than the standard Firefox new tab page. I was able to configure this using the “browser.newtab.url” setting available in the “about:config” page.

As of today, with the release of Firefox version 41, for security reasons this setting is no longer supported. Fortunately there is a New Tab Override add-on that can be installed to provide the same facility.

 

Blogging Genesis

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buzz3

Thanks to TimeSnapper, this image captures the moment just after posting my 3rd Google Buzz entry.

Five years ago today I opened my gmail and found an extra link under the Inbox labelled “Buzz”, Google’s new social media platform. In a poor attempt at ironic humour I posted a comment on Buzz about the irrelevance of Buzz, and two days later another post about how I didn’t “get” or like Buzz.

But in the ensuing weeks, the accessibility of that Buzz link, sitting just one click away from my Inbox lured me in and I started using Google Buzz to post my random thoughts and observations on the oddities of life.

Less than two years later, Google itself decided it didn’t “get” or like Buzz, and they shut it down, so I migrated on over to Google+ to continue my random blurtings.

My postings to Google+ lasted for eighteen months, but I never really liked Google+, it was a few extra steps away from the Inbox, and I was beginning to be frustrated by the lack of formatting options. Also I was continually irked by a changing interface and Google’s insistence of foisting upon me in the “What’s Hot” section, the predilections of a billion people who were not like me. So in June 2013, this WordPress based website was born.

So five years and 391 Buzz/Google+/Wordpress postings later, here I am. But why am I here? I know (because I measure it) that the readership of this blog is a very, very close approximation to zero. So why do I do it? There are a number of different reasons, why I post various kinds of content, but the overriding reason is because I enjoy it. I enjoy the challenge of stringing words together to make something readable. I enjoy the challenge of watching out for the absurdities of life and human behaviour to comment on. I enjoy the challenge of snapping an unusual and opportunistic photo of the everyday things of life that highlights the beauty around us. I enjoy posting content that I think other people may find useful, even if it’s only one person.

In a way, this blog is also my own little private rebellion against the social media madness of our world that promulgates the lie that something has to be retweeted, hashtagged, liked and linked to death, for it to be meaningful, or worth doing.

So to end this little introspection on my five year blogging adventure, do I have a favourite post over that time? Yes, my observation in July 2010 that swapping the staff of “A Current Affair” with “Australia’s Funniest Home Videos” would instantly result in ACA having more credible and competent journalism, and “Australia’s Funniest Home Videos” becoming more humorous. As true today as it ever was.

Faux Feedback

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The ABC News website recently revamped their home page layout and invited feedback from their audience …

feedback… which was overwhelmingly negative, and the moderator responds with a post basically saying that all that negative feedback is misguided, because, well the ABC is just doing what Facebook and Twitter do …

feedback2… as if Facebook and Twitter is the gold standard of Web user interface design!?!?!

What’s the point of asking for feedback if all you’re going to do is dismiss it?

 

 

 

 

Exodus

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It’s been exactly one year since the genesis of this website, and a bit over a month since my exodus from my initial web hosting provider.

After a month with my new web hosting provider I can report … absolutely nothing. Completely uneventful. No problems whatsoever, which is exactly as it should be. I’m currently using the Saver+ Economy Hosting plan from NetVirtue, which at $1.95/month is superb value for a low data, low bandwidth, low importance website like this one.

Migrating WordPress

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More for my own benefit than for anyone else, in case I need to do it again, these are the steps I used in migrating my web site from one hosting provider to another, keeping the same domain name. In practice it was a bit more bothersome than what’s described below, as I took a few wrong paths and had to backtrack. The two pages that I found useful in doing the migration were …

In summary, the steps I took were …

  1. Sign up with a new hosting provider, choosing the option to use an existing domain and configure DNS to point to the new site when ready.
  2. On the old site/host:
    1. Get a backup of the WordPress database on the old host, using the host control panel.
    2. Get a backup of the files on the old host by using FTP.
  3. I added temporary entries to my \windows\system32\etc\drivers\hosts file to point my domain name to the new host.
  4. On the new site/host.
    1. Create a new MySQL database, with the same name, user, password as on the old site. All the details I needed were in the “wp-config.php” file in the root directory.
    2. Use FTP to upload the files to the new site.
    3. Use phpMyAdmin to import content from the old database into the new database.
    4. Test that everything is working OK on the new host.
    5. Add a new blog post
  5. Remove (or comment out) the temporary host entries in my \windows\system32\etc\drivers\hosts file.
  6. With my domain name registrar, change the DNS settings to point to the new hosting provider’s name servers.
  7. Wait for the new site (with its new blog post) to appear when the DNS change has propagated. (The domain registrar page suggested that this can take up to 48 hours, in my case I made the change about 8pm one night, and it had propagated by the time I got up the next morning.)

One minor obstacle I had in attempting this migration was that after uploading the content to the new server in step 4 above, the front page of the site was working OK, but clicking on any links to content elsewhere resulted in a “404 not found” error.

It turned out that in step 4.B above, when I was uploading the website files, I didn’t upload all the files in the root directory, as I knew that some of them were specific to the old server not the new server. e.g. files like the error log, or config files for the fantastico installer. I got this mostly right but unfortunately one of the files that I thought I didn’t need to upload was “.htaccess” – but as this forum article steered me straight – it is needed. After uploading the “.htaccess” file, the site sprang to life as it should have.

UPDATE 06-Jun-2014

For another WordPress site where I wanted to create a copy of the site for dev/test purposes I used the Duplicator plugin, which was pretty straightforward.

New web hosting provider

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I have just migrated this blog to a new web hosting provider, and if you’re seeing this then it means that it has all worked successfully. Formerly the blog was hosted with “Crazy Domains”, and while they have been mostly OK, in the last year I have been unhappy about a few things.

  1. When I signed up with them, they were promoting themselves as being “Australian” which proved less than true, the company actually being based in the middle east somewhere, which earned them a whack on the corporate backside from the the .au Domain Administration.
  2. On more occasions than I was happy with, I’d try to update my blog and find that the service (Web or FTP or both) was down. For a low volume site like mine that’s not a huge impact, but on the other hand, keeping a simple low volume website online and available shouldn’t be that problematic.
  3. The last time I had a problem connecting to the site via FTP, I reported the issue via an e-mail, and although they fixed the problem OK (or perhaps the problem resolved itself), the e-mail they sent back to me was misguided to say the least – they blamed the problem on me saying that I was using the incorrect username/password, which was definitely NOT the case as I was using the exact same saved credentials in my FTP client all the time. Now I work in IT and I well know that problems can occur, but to simply blame the user for the problem when its not their fault is pretty low.
  4. The final straw was when my 1 year renewal came up, and after a reasonable price for the first year of web hosting they wanted to jack up the price by 234% on the first year’s rates. No thank you.
  5. Oh, and also their “last century” anachronistic use of sexist images on their website was pretty galling.

So here I am with a new web hosting provider, based in Australia. They have a 30 day money back guarantee, so I’ll wait a month before I name them and either praise their prowess, or drub their dysfunction.