Craig's Blog

This blog consists of mainly the techy trials and tribulations of running the Pianoshop.Co.Uk web site.

Pause for breath

1st October 2007

Last week was a farily quiet week at work, in fact I was at home ill Thursday and Friday as I'd been not well for most of the week. This was after having been incredibly busy at work for three or four weeks, working at wekends and late into the night.

But now I have recovered and am back into my stride of working on the various piano sites about 2 hours an evening. Still doing a lot of tidying up of the code, making it HTML 4.01 compliant and removing older stuff. Also cleaning up the database structure ready for the Web 2.0 style functionality.

Server Move - Part 3

15th August 2007

Hmmm, it seems that the data was one of my smaller worries... I have ended up rewriting most of the Pianos web site PHP code as it wasn't compatible with the new server.
But the effort has been well worth it as the site should be much easier to maintain and extend now.
I will use this as a springboard to start building WEB 2.0 style functionality.

ALSO - Today I have re-instated the Forums and *hopefully* made them a bit more spam proof. I had to take them down as while ago as they got clogged up with filth...

Server Move - Part 2

10th June 2007

Well, part of moving from one server to another is the enormous amount of data that has to be moved across. The task I am handling this weekend is moving all the piano images across. I am doing this very carefully as I had a nasty experience last time I tried to move all these files from server to server (about a year ago). What happened was this:

I thought "Hmm this will be easy"... Just tar up all the image files into one large tarball, then wget it from the new server, then untar it and hey presto - all done! What actually happened was that I attempted to tar the files up (all 10,000 of them) and the server did a core dump - AARGGH ! Then I tried again and it did it AGAIN - AAARRGGGHHHHH!! So this time I decided to do it one file at a time.

THis is quite a slow and tedious process - but I have automated it. On the old server I have a script that read the entire image directory and created a file listing into a new table in the pianos database. This has a flag that shows whether the file has been copied across. On the new server I then have a script that reads this table and looks for files that haven't been copied across yet. In chunks of about 100 files a time it reads the files from the old server one by one, writes them to disk on the new server and updates the table as file copied so it will not need to be done again. Simple really - and no core-dump-hell !

Spamalama Ding Dong

19th April 2007

The contact form on The Virtual Pianoshop seems to be attracting regular spam of the form of messages that contain numerous links to various pharmacy and tobacco. I need to upgrade the form handling software to be able to reject smap like this.

Server Move

7th April 2007

At the moment I am undertaking the mamoth task of moving the sites from one server to another server. This is not easy as The Virtual Pianoshop web site is backed by a very busy database, and there are about 15,000 images stored. To make the transition easier I have decided to start to split apart the web applications into separate pieces. The DNS (which I was doing myself and was a pain !) is now managed by DNS Made Easy - they have a very handy quick control panel interface (I have two accounts with them as I have more than 25 domains). I am moving the image hosting to a third party provider; Amazon Simple Storage Soultion (S3) - which also has the benefit of rock solid infrastructure, 99.999% availability and automatic backups. I have also signed up for a small Virtual Server with Redwood Virtual - which I use for screen scrape requests happening in the background. And finally the main web server will be at Superb Internet. I did have a shared hosting account at Fasthosts but found that this was not fast or powerful enough for the neeeds of the sites.

Facelift and Services

1st April 2007

After far too long, and with the PianoShop.co.uk web site being in desparate need of a face lift I have given it one! I have removed the Pianos.co.uk logo as this is now obsolete, replaced it with the PianoShop.co.uk logo and replaced the static image links with CSS style mouseovereey colour change text generated links.

I have also started rebuilding the section of the site. For various reasons this was disabled about a year ago. It now has a fully working Piano Tuner search facility, courtesy of the PianoForte Tuner's Association. I have also started to rebuild the piano movers section. At the moment this is serviced by Stephen Willet's excellent Student Mover's Forum web site.
The other sections of the site will be re-instated in due course.

Spamalot

27th March 2007

Certain people seem to think it's fun to spam these PianoForums with their links to Canadian Pharamcy or Online Gambling websites. I however consider this to be useless piffle. Most of these users were coming from the same email domain so I have now banned this. I of course check the memberlist everyday to see who has joined and weed out any suspicious looking users.
On another note the email sending capabilities of the forums did not seem to be working properly due to a server misconfiguration issue so I have fixed this now. Hopefully any forum users who wish to be informed of when their posts are replied to should now be receiving notifications via email.

Forum Responses

24th March 2007

Having had about a week off work I am now starting to respond to some of the posts on the forum. It has been one of the best weeks of my life - my son was born last Sunday at 4:30 a.m. so I Am the Daddy (!) Anyway, getting back to the forums, I was going to do piano aging for a small fee of £3, however I have now decided to do this for free on the forum. If somebody wants to know how old their piano is if they post the make and serial number on the forum I will see if the age information is available in the Pierce Piano Atlas.

I have been doing a little work on the PianoShop.co.uk web site when I have had the chance. This has been long overdue maintenance such as fixing broken links, removing outdated material, trying to make the hacky old HTML 3 code more XHTML compliant (!) and updating some of the piano info pages.

Forum

15th March 2007

Today I have *finally* set up the forum again for the main PianoShop.co.uk web site. The previous forums have not had a very happy history unfortunately.
In 2006 I was using vBulletin software which is great but it has a fairly hefty annual license fee, and when the license expired I couldn't stomach the there figure fee to renew it...
Before that for a couple of years I had a successful phpBB forum. However, whilst in the west country late one night in a pub car park in the West Country I had a phone call to say that the forum had been hacked by some anti-terrorist group, so I pulled it off line for a while whilst looking for a more secure solution.

New Contract

7th March 2007

Today I have started a new LAMP contract, working for Relationship Audits and Management. This will be doing my stock-in-trade, creating dynamic database driven web applications written in PHP and MySQL...
This means I will be doing the rush hour train commute from Havant to Central London for the next few days so late back in the evenings.

Old Contract

3rd March 2007

Today is my last day at Viewsonic Europe Ltd., I will miss them (hello Nicki, Simon Patrick, Karen, Zoe et al if you're reading !). I had a blast at Viewsonic, working there from November 2005 to March 2007 (with a gap inbetween). They are a great bunch of people (in the Crawley office where I worked) and I got to do some very interesting work. Simon and I did most of the work on creating the Go Channel Marketing Web Site, Simon doing the lovely front end graphical layout wizardry and me doing the backend database and n-tier application stylee stuff.

New Laptop / Zend Studio

27th February 2007

I have my new laptop today, a Sony Vaio with 17" screen running at the ridiculously high resoultion of 1920 x 1200 (known in geek world as WUXGA). I have also purchased a copy of Zend Studio to run on it. This will help making my PHP coding a lot easier and more productive.