school website

i have been asked to pick up another website based in Oldham

it is http://www.saddleworthpreparatoryschool.org.uk/ which was given to me in the form of a .shtml website. I have never seen one of these before but it simply allows static pages to have common parts stored in 1 file so there is no duplication.

While analysing the stats i notice it does quite well for target visitors but further investigation into the html is worrying. The site has been copied from another totally unrelated to schools but some of the previous meta has been left in so there are references to web hosting and so on.

Also, i have never seen a website with the closing /head and opening body missing either but there you are.

The owner wants more interaction on the site so i am proposing php/smarty to do this along with a control panel to manage it.

fasthosts misery

Is it just me or are fasthosts dedicated servers possessed?

I can’t believe I have just spent £1,000 for a dedicated server only to have 1 problem after another. Starting with journal issues (whatever they are) things have just gone worse and worse.

What really bugged me was that they accused me of corrupting the journal! From their stock server, I installed php 5.2.6 using YUM, and that was it. I ran some command-line php scripts that accessed the mysql db and wrote html files and now i have some serious problems with it.

Anyway I have jacked them off - i cant offer their services to my customers at this rate. I think i will go back to Apples (i cant afford an xserve so i think i’ll try a mac mini) as they have been very reliable for me in the past.

please let me know if you have had any similar (or opposite) experiences with fasthosts.

football live streaming site

i was recently commissioned to develop a website that served live streaming video to paying subscribers

It doesn’t officially launch until Dec 25th, just in time for the Boxing Day football matches. Part of the challenge with this site was to prevent the same user logging in twice to view a stream, as if they sent their mates the login details to get a free match. I used quite an extensive class to get around this and to put hard limits in place so as not to overload the server. If you want to find it do a google search for “442tv” (clients request to remain anonymous)