echodrift

Apologies

I feel as if it is necessary to explain the recent “downtime.” Some visitors may have noticed that, at various times, they receive a “Page Load Error” or “Page Cannot be Displayed” message when trying to access this site or Captured. There’s a slight problem, though: I don’t have an explanation.

On November 17 I reported this issue to my hosting company. My sister had asked me if my sites were down. I pulled them up and found out that no, they weren’t. Not for me, at least. She was not able to access them for several days. In the following weeks I found out that at seemingly random times, sometimes just hours or even minutes of being able to access either of the sites, the only thing I was able to see was a “Page Load Error” message. During that time I was in communication with the hosting company through their support system regarding this issue. They said that it could have something to do with my ISP. However, it’s not just my ISP. At present I know with certainty that three separate ISPs have issues resolving the domain name. I have been told by others that they also have these problems accessing the site.

According to my host it has never been an issue with the server being down. To my knowledge, my sites are the only ones on the server having issues. I have never been told otherwise. They have informed me that they have been looking into the issue to see if the problem is being caused by something other than my ISP. After several messages back and forth with my host one measure has been taken to possibly fix the situation. I am currently waiting for more information to find out if this has been resolved for good. Since it happens at random to different people it will be difficult to determine.

So I have another favor to ask: If at any time after this you find that you cannot access this site please let me know. A short message to atyler[at]gmail.com will be enough, though if you don’t care to include who your ISP is I would greatly appreciate it.

Challenging

I realized something while writing that last post: I am not a good writer. I’ve never been under the illusion that I am a great writer but I’ve concluded that I’m not even a good writer. Sure, I have a fairly decent grasp of grammar, vocabulary and spelling¹ but that doesn’t necessarily mean I know how to put all of that together into sentences that convey what I want to say. Going back to read some things I’ve written is almost painful. I would like for that to change.

So. How does one get better at something they aren’t good at? Usually the answer is practice. In this case I think it will be a great help. In some ways I have been practicing. This whole site, for example, has required me to write about several different things such as myself, the site, and whatever strikes my fancy when I decide to make a post. Like now. I’m writing about how poor of a writer I am.

Sometimes a person needs a little help. I don’t want to start writing the kind of entries that start out like “So today I went to work. [This] and [that] happened and then I went to lunch. Once I got back to work I had to [do this]…” It’s just not that interesting. Still, I do enjoy writing and posting here. I just need something to talk about.

That’s where you come in: suggest a topic for me to write about. I can’t promise that I will write about each and every one as I believe that some topics should never see the light of the “Publish” button. In fact, I have a post that I need to work on about that very subject. (I just haven’t been able to clearly express my thoughts on it.) Come on, folks, give me a challenge!

1. Even when I don’t know how to spell a word or when I don’t know exactly what a word means there’s always Firefox’s spellchecker plus the all-mighty Webster’s dictionary. People should take advantage of Webster more often than they do.

Pretty awesome

My technology category has been neglected for a while now. I’ve not had any inspiration for a post for it until I started thinking about how much I use Firefox 3′s Awesome Bar.

Firefox 3 has been out for a while now. A while being six months. I have been a Firefox user for several years now. I would go into the reasons why but that would be a post on its own. One of the major changes I noticed between Firefox 3 and Firefox 2 was their alterations to the address bar which had been dubbed The Awesome Bar. At first I was not at all convinced of its awesomeness, mostly because old habits die hard. I was definitely in the habit of visiting sites by typing the URL in the address bar, clicking on my bookmarks, or, as a last resort, searching through my history if I only remembered part of a site’s address.

Thus, I was highly annoyed with Firefox 3 when I first started using it. If I started typing an address it did not always bring up the site I wanted. Say, if I wanted to visit echodrift I would start typing in echo… and it would bring up results for sites that had echo as part of the title or somewhere in the URL. That was not acceptable! When I typed echo I wanted to see results that started with echodrift.com! Not some article that I may have read weeks ago that had the page title as “Echo…” maybe echo wasn’t the best example. My point still stands: I did not like the Awesome Bar because I did not know how it functioned and had a totally different expectation of how an address bar should function.

After six months of use I don’t think I’d switch back for anything. I love the Awesome Bar. Now that I know how it works I can find sites I’ve visited before quickly and easily. I visit a lot of websites that I don’t bother to bookmark, such as flickr. However, I don’t normally want to visit flickr’s homepage. Instead I like to go and refresh the Explore page that brings up list of random images from the last 7 days. Because the Awesome Bar searches page titles, URLs, and other information I don’t have to type flickr.com/explore/… Instead I can just type interesting and have the link brought up immediately. This is just one of myriad of examples I could give.

The best part is it learns. One article I read referred to it as frecency, which is an algorithm that combines frequency and recency. The more you visit a site using specific keywords the farther up in the search results that site is listed. Recently visited sites are higher up on the list than others. Pretty awesome, huh?

There are many other features of the Awesome Bar that I haven’t discussed: search results show the site’s fave icon, page title, URL, if you’ve bookmarked the page and other things. The Awesome Bar can also search the tags you’ve added to your bookmark list.

If you use Firefox, what was your response to the Awesome Bar? If you don’t use Firefox… what browser do you use and why?

Photo roundup

Thanksgiving break was a much needed holiday. I got to spend a lot of time with family, especially ones that also live out of town and don’t get to visit much. We got in a few games of Canasta as well. It’s been a very long time since I’ve played so that was very enjoyable. My team took turns getting skunked and being the skunkers.

And now instead of rambling on about rather pointless bits of information I’ll share some pictures I took over the break.