Tagged: Technical support

Amazon.com: Apple Pro Training Series: OS X Lion Support Essentials: Supporting and Troubleshooting OS X Lion (9780321775078): Kevin M. White: Books

Amazon.com: Apple Pro Training Series: OS X Lion Support Essentials: Supporting and Troubleshooting OS X Lion (9780321775078): Kevin M. White: Books. This was a boring book. It says it is for beginners or intermediate, but those users would be confused by these contents. Many of the things in this book are academic. They are not used in the real world. This is the case with most training books however.

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Gmail Badge won’t update: Apple Support Communities

Diagram of a computer hard disk drive
Image via Wikipedia

Gmail Badge won’t update: Apple Support Communities. Nice solution by Scott Nash. I wonder if this is a weakness with Lion Mail?

Ok.  With the help of tech support, I managed to fix this problem.  Since I’m clearly NOT a moron who just doesn’t know what I’m doing, I suspect it’s possible others might have the same problem.  The issue was the envelope index file in the library.

~library/mail/v2/mail data/envelope index

If you delete that file it forces a ‘deep rebuild’ that recollects ALL your metadata.  It does not have recall your data from the servers, just the hard drive so it’s pretty quick.  After about four minutes of rebuilding, all my stuff reappeared and the badges were correct.

This is similar, but more extensive than the ‘rebuild’ at the bottom of the mailbox menu.  That didn’t work, but this did.

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Why did I change my banner and why am I advertising?

CANNES, FRANCE - JUNE 24: Microsoft CEO Steve...
Image by Getty Images via @daylife

I had run this blog for free for 3 years and didn’t have any advertising on it. However increasingly my customers have asked for WordPress self-hosted help and I wanted to run a site of my own rather than just building sites for others.

I have used Disk Drill and believe in the product. I have used a variety of data recovery software in the past both commercial and freeware and nothing worked as well. In addition it allows me to pay for the self-hosting cost of the site. Hopefully with the money I might make on revenues I can do more in-depth pieces rather than just this being a sideline. If I don’t get enough money to pay the hosting bills then I will go back to the regular WordPress.com site. It is limiting, but has some nice features.

I don’t sell out my integrity to any advertiser. If anyone has a problem with Disk Drill please contact me and I will work with you to figure out any issues it might cause. I am not their technical support but I feel the responsibility since you trusted me for the recommendation. I will do what I can to make sure your experience is a pleasurable one.

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The downside of being hosted with WordPress.com

The logo of the blogging software WordPress.
Image via Wikipedia

Generally WordPress is very good. It has some odd things however, and I wanted to share one of the biggest ones for me. It seems that you have two options when you have comments.

  1. To have anyone comment, and all pingbacks to post automatically.
  2. To have to approve each comment, and have to approve all pingbacks.

Now clearly with the volume of Spam I get, over 11k in the past 2 years I can’t allow just anyone to comment. However every-time that I link to an older post I have written I have to approve it.

Now naturally I ask the spam people if they could change this behavior. They said that it was up to WordPress to offer this as a feature. I asked WP technical support and they confirmed that those were my two choices.

I think that there are 3 things that cause people to want to move to a self-hosted situation.

  1. More control over the plug-ins or ways that a blog functions. If I had a self-hosted blog then I would have a choice of discussion plug-ins. So then I could theoretically change or find a better way to handle pingbacks.
  2. More control of the themes/css/java. It is amazing the kind of beautiful blog themes that you see on the web. Unfortunately even the premium themes are boring/disappointing. It is frustrating that you have to pay for a CSS upgrade. Part of what makes a successful site is how it looks. I understand that WP needs to make a profit, I wish they would explore the advertising aspect more. Like if they help their customers gain an audience then that advertising money should be credited to them. For their immediate need, they could offer a partnership ad program where someone could pay $30 a month and then half of the money raised from ads goes to them. That would ensure the payment that WP needs, and also provide an incentive for the blogger to make good content. Things like java and stuff are expected by surfers, so the lack of things like flash and more advanced things don’t help people stick at a site. I paid for the No-ad upgrade, but I had no way to know if WP was making more or less money by me doing this. If the monitzation had been more transparent then we could make better decisions on our resources/times.
  3. More control over performance, analytics, heat tracking, or really the wide range of functionality that a normal site would allow you to have. You can’t use many tools like Google’s Website Optimizer or any way to do things like A/B testing/multivariate testing. Really if you are trying to ensure a SLA or quality of service there is no way to enable this. For that reason alone you can’t really use WP for a business purpose.
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