Skip to main content

The Lost Weekend!

No - not lost in a fog of alcohol - a weekend without streaming samples!

In our enthusiasm to launch or Spring Sale with it's 50% volume discount - up from the 'Launch' Discount of 20% - we made extensive use of the powerful Find and Replace command in Dreamweaver and stupidly omitted to test the streaming sample pages after we had uploaded them!

So what did we find in the failure log this morning but a lot of sample files with odd characters in the filename. It took a moment or two to cop on because we often see the results of failed unauthorized attempts to download these samples in this log. Then a quick check with four OS/Browser combinations convinced us we had a problem Houston.

Thinking back to Friday afternoon's activity and the rush to make those changes and a penny began to drop. A test on Widor's Toccata confirmed the diagnosis and we have now reversed the evil spell and restored streaming happiness!

Because of the way the files are organised/named we avoided this problem on our Ringtone files so at least they were streaming.

Finally, I'd just like to say a belated Hello! to the five RSS subscribers to this blog. After a rather slow start I had stopped monitoring our Feedburner account some months ago and the id and password got misplaced. It took a number of retries to regain access.

It is nice to know that you are there and provides that bit more motivation on the slow news days to try and come up with something interesting.

Popular posts from this blog

Adding to the collection or ...

There are more opportunities to add to this collection but we think that it is now time to make some additional payment options available. For low cost items, credit card transactions are rather expensive so we will need to trade the benefits to us of larger orders against a premium for individual track purchases. This means adding shopping cart facilities along side the simple BitPass functionality and is going to be a bit of a programming challenge. More of this anon - in the mean time here is another Brandenburg Concerto LoFi streaming sample - first movement of No3 from Johann Sebastian Bach himself and our arrangement on steel drums and marimba - full HiFi track only 0.99$(US).

Shop Re-opens

The PHP upgrade on my server precipitated closure of the shop for a couple of weeks but I finally found the time to work through the backlog of OS Commerce upgrades that I had been putting off and Lo and Behold the shop is working again. I still need to do a bit of testing on the shopping cart arithmetic and make sure that the downloading is still working properly after the changes I have made. I'll also have a look at the recent contributions to see if there are any other improvements I should be making. In the mean time there has been another surge of Ranking changes on Google as reported on Rankpulse and it is evident that our rankings continue to swing around on a daily basis but our overall position and visitor numbers seem pretty stable - even the shop closure didn't seem to have much of an impact.

Out of Beta

Blogger is out of beta and that was pretty painless. The new features look quite interesting so we'll give them a go shortly. No collaborators on the search engine yet so I think we'll do a page on the main site and see what we can achieve from there. My news group post killed the thread I responded to - so nothing from that source either. An index page update was picked up by Google the following day so we seem to have all that part of the system sorted and I finally got round to tidying up the title and description so that might generate more responses. We are ending the year on over 2000 visitors a week on the main site but not many on this blog - I'm really doing it for my personal benefit now but it helps to imagine that anyone could come along and read it. In fact I suspect that we have far more readers of individual pages thrown up by searches than we do regular readers.