Media72 Hosting Articles and Tips

Panic the makers of the excellent Transmit file transfer application have released a new piece of software called Coda. It intends to be a developer workflow application, "what's that?" I hear you ask, well it's a text editor, css editor, site manager, preview, ftp client, terminal and reference guide all rolled into one application.

Miles Evans has written a full review of this application on his blog so head over there to get his first thoughts of the application. At $79 USD ($69 if you already own transmit) it's a very reasonably priced application when compared to other solutions on the market.

Our support desk was fixed yesterday by the folks at Kayako, it looks like we were hit by an upgrade bug in the software that only affects some specific sever configurations.

After a successful upgrade of our test support desk the upgrade of our live support desk did not go so smoothly. We have been struck by a known bug in the upgrade process and are currently waiting for Kayko support to fix the issue for us. The support desk still appears to be functional so tickets should be dealt with as normal, if you have an urgent issue please submit your request to our info@media72.co.uk as well as the support desk. You will notice an error displayed at the top of every page until Kayako have managed to fix the issue. Thank you for your patience and support.

Late last week the long awaited Ruby on Rails 1.2 was released including a whole host of new features. David's blog post talks about the new release.

And the best part? We hate to keep our customers waiting, so, we have already installed Ruby on Rails 1.2 on all of our servers and its available for use today. Just days after its release you will be able to use the new features on your Media72 hosting account.

A word of warning! Ruby on Rails 1.2 is a brand new major release and as such may still contain bugs. You should take this into consideration before deploying a 1.2 rails application. Also, if you are upgrading an application make sure to read the change notes for details on what's changed and possible incompatibilities.

MacRabbit has released CSSedit 2.0 and it looks like a great upgrade. Included amongst the new features are a very useful website preview, something lacking from version 1.x, called x-ray which lets you select HTML elements and view hierarchical information about the element as well as margin and padding information. Other noteworthy features are browser integration, CSS validation, style grouping, and milestones (aka, a simple version control system). My personal favourite is their dig at Microsoft "Production quality CSS requires some (or lots of) tweaking to get every browser to cooperate.", subtle.

We are currently working on a web application with Chris Garrett Media. We can't tell you what it does yet, or even what it's called. What we can tell you is how we are going to build it over at The Topian. Our plan is to post about as much of the applications planning, development, marketing, and design as we can.

Ever wondered what a website looks like as a graph? Well wonder no more... The Websites as Graphs HTML DOM Visualizer is a cool Java Applet that analysis the code of a web page and creates a graph of your website. Although it serves no useful purpose it certainly lets you have some geeky fun for a few minutes. Here is the Media72 Hosting website as a graph.

First off let me welcome you to the new Media72 hosting blog. The aim of this blog is to provide articles, information, hints and tips for our customers and anyone who runs a website. We will be writing technical articles on the various aspects of hosting ranging from security considerations to software reviews to PHP coding and more.

Not only is this a place where we will write about topics we think you should know about and are important, we also want to provide you with the information and articles you want to read. If there is something you want to know abut that relates to web hosting we invite you to submit and article request. We will pick the best, most popular, and interesting questions we receive and answer them on this blog.

To kick off the blog with our first article we have written about something many people ask us, "What is the difference between POP and IMAP and which one should I be using?". In this article we take a look at each in turn, tell you what they mean and how to choose the best connection method for you.