68 posts tagged “web 2·0”

A surprising thing happened tonight: I could no longer get a compose window at my second Vox account.
   I have done some more neighbour removals (after the clue from Kimmie) to see if it made any difference. While that account is working again, I could not relate the glitch to any particular neighbour. In fact, I have the same neighbours I did prior to the glitch occurring there.
   I tried removing a few more here to see if it made any difference to whether a compose screen would appear. In all cases, it did not. If you are a Voxer who was puzzled why I added you to my neighbourhood today, when you know full well I had added you before, it was down to this experiment.
   This compose window took 12 hours to emerge, so the weeding-out of dormant and departed neighbours yesterday has had no real effect on this account. Removing neighbours added in October 2009 also made no difference.
   I am a stubborn fellow, more so when I know that by solving my problem, we potentially solve Patricia’s and Ninja’s, with their composing-blocks of varying degrees here on Vox. Here’s hoping Six Apart is as willing to get to the bottom of this as I am.

Hmm, is it fixed? It still took a minute or two for the compose window to come up, but that’s better than hours (or days). It came up by itself, without refreshes. Are more recent neighbours safe?
   I’m heading over to tell Patricia on her Facebook what Kimmie told me, and see if this helps her.
   Though if it were the mere act of following a neighbour on Vox that started this whole bug, then what does it say about that Voxer? And why should the rest of us who are innocent be dragged down with someone with a troublesome account?
   It’s still a Vox bug, but at least we can get to the bottom of it (eventually).

Does anyone get an error like this when they log out of Vox?

   I wonder if this is connected to why I cannot compose on here without waiting hours or days for the editing window to appear.

Just Tweeting with Robin, who can, strangely, blog from his home in Auckland, New Zealand on to Vox. I have found it nearly impossible to blog for most days (or parts of days) this month, and for many days since August, whether I am in Wellington or Christchurch, using a Windows machine or a Mac, never mind which browser.
   One observation I have made is that when things do not work, the status bar has ‘Waiting for www.vox.com’. When it believes the page has “loaded”, the message disappears. Of course, all I see is this:

The source is empty as well.
   I have noticed that when the compose screen does come up, ‘Waiting for www.vox.com’ changes to other servers, too, such as static.vox.com. Right now, the screen comes up in a very rapid (for Vox) two hours—go Vox!
   I’m deducing one of two things: when pings come from here in Wellington or Christchurch, they reach the Vox server, but the server fails to go forth to the subdomain and load whatever files are necessary for the compose screen to appear.
   Or, two different ISPs in Wellington and Christchurch (TelstraClear in Wellington and Christchurch, and Surfspot in Christchurch) can only ping www.vox.com but not resolve for static.vox.com. But surely these subdomain URLs are the server end and not the ISP’s? (I believe they are on our own server.)
   I tried a US proxy server last night to see if the compose screen would come up and, once again, it did not. (Proxy servers are a good test: for a while I could not access the Autocade home page from New Zealand, and had to route things through proxies before I could see it. Since complaining to the ISP, things have been fixed.)
   I would love to know what caused the Australian blackout in August, which did not affect New Zealand. That time, I recall Snowy, Ninja and other Australian residents could not blog, and it seems similar to what I experience now.
   I will test Vox from Auckland in a few days’ time, and use a third ISP, to see what happens.
   Diagnoses from boffins who actually know about this stuff are welcome.

I’m still testing this site to see how long the compose screen takes to appear. Right now: five minutes. It’s a darned sight better than the 75–120 minutes of last night, and the two days of earlier this month. I suspect Daisy, who is most Voxers’ contact inside the company that created this site, doesn’t work every day—I wrote to her again last night (oddly, I can still DM; and I can still comment. I just cannot compose or add media).
   I have tried this site on Windows and Mac, on IE, Safari and Firefox, using two different ISPs, and in two different cities, and got the same behaviour. It’s been happening with increasing frequency since August. I will briefly try it from a third city shortly.
   I know from feedback from some of you that this bug happened in Australia, too, but it hasn’t happened to you lately (though Ninja has had to switch to IE just to use this site, so things are not normal).
   Interestingly, Robin can still blog from Auckland so the issue is not nationwide.
   My opinion: I was a Vox beta tester and was one of its biggest cheerleaders, and the silence from the company is not making me terribly happy.
   And, yes, I still had interesting posts to share, but by the time the window comes up, the inspiration has long passed. Sorry if I sound like a broken record—I really wish they would fix this site, or turn back whatever new programming they put in which is obviously blocking some users. I have seen a lot of neighbours leave Vox over the last year or so, though oftentimes they do not say why. I wonder if they found it as buggy as I have in the last few months.

An interesting little application on Facebook:

 
Gender breakdown: 43% female / 57% male
Relationship status: 58% single / 42% taken
Political breakdown: 87% democrats / 13% republicans
Geographic distribution: 34 countries, 30 states
Most common zodiac sign: Libra (99 friends)
Favorite music: Jazz (27 friends)
Favorite TV show: Lost (22 friends)
Favorite movie: Shawshank Redemption (17 friends)
Favorite book: (14 friends)
Favorite activity: Reading (32 friends)

No book was listed, which might mean 14 of my friends are illiterate.
   The sample was my c. 1,300 Facebook connections, and I imagine it only took information where it was available.
   A lot of it was expected: as someone who has been to two dozen countries, having contacts in 34 sounds reasonable. I have been to 10 US states, so having contacts in 30 also sounds reasonable. I have noticed I have a lot of Libran friends, long before Facebook came along. I am surprised about Lost, since I have not watched it since the second season; as well as The Shawshank Redemption featuring on 17 friends’ lists.
   What was a big surprise was the 87 per cent Democratic proportion. I admit to having many leftist ideas, but in other respects I am quite centrist. I have friends on both sides of the political divide, as the comments on this blog alone illustrate. I figured Dems would outnumber Republicans, but not to a nearly seven-to-one ratio.

I was trying out a program that showed where one’s Twitter followers are on a map. I had no idea Brisbane was so far away from New Zealand.

   I will have to tell my friends on the US west coast how Brisbane is only a few hours’ flight away, at most.

The good news: Facebook, last week, stopped accusing me on a daily basis of copyright infringement, but I had to battle them for over a month to get the warning removed.
   The bad news: the site still doesn’t really work. Funny, it worked in 2007.
   For instance, I was surprised to note that comments made by both myself and one friend, Gary, had disappeared from my wall earlier today:

Gary didn’t delete them, and neither did I. Facebook also removed status updates I manually typed into the site.
   To double-check, I put an s after http in the status bar. And everything was back again:    Considering the Facebook logo is still missing on the standard server, along with the bottom bar, then I can continue to deem the website incompatible with Firefox on Vista. This is one heck of a buggy site that seems to get worse by the day.

Wow, I guess no one uses the Twitter application on Facebook any more. I know I had signed up, but given that it stopped working today, then this does not surprise me. Facebook must be peeved off if it reports that the plug-in has a grand total of zero users:

According to Mashable, people must upgrade their Wordpress installations as an attack is under way. I believe we only have a couple of sites that would be potentially at risk: Lucire has already been sorted, but the Your Wellington blog is still processing in the background as I type.
   People say how easy this automatic upgrading is, but I have found it very difficult. I have done several of these upgrades now, and this is all I see:

There is no way of telling when this is completed. Users report that it is done in minutes, but once I tried to stop the Lucire one after an hour, and it corrupted the entire installation.
   Lucire’s upgrading process conked out after a few minutes earlier tonight, only to report, when heading back in to Wordpress, that the upgrade was successful. There, too, all I had was a blank screen before the error report.
   I do not dare stop Your Wellington’s one, even though it has now taken longer than the Lucire upgrading.