My hosting provider has informed me that they are performing some upgrades to the power systems in their data center this weekend. I will be powering-down the FrameAlbum server during the upgrades. The website and frame update feeds will be unavailable from approx. 11PM ET Dec 22 (4AM Dec 23 GMT) until approx. 9AM ET Dec 23 (2PM Dec 23 GMT).
During this time the website will be unavailable and your frames will not be able to pull updates from the service. This mostly affects the weather radar feeds; they will receive no updates during this period.
I will be posting updates on the @FrameAlbum Twitter feed and our Facebook page.
Happy Holidays!
UPDATE: Apparently I can’t read calendars very well. The original post indicated that this outage would occur overnight Friday to Saturday AM – WRONG. The correct timeframe is Saturday overnight to Sunday AM. Too much eggnog I guess. 😉
Yes, that’s a fancy way of saying the durn thing is broken.
Both the website and the frame update service are down for the moment — I’m on it bhaybee!
T.
Update: Sunday @ 2:20PM ET – My hosting provider had a unplanned ‘power event’ last night due to a failed UPS. The server itself seems to have come back OK but my firewall, not so much. I’m working with the hosting provider to resolve.
Update #2: Sunday @ 11:15PM ET – Looks like the firewall is toast. I’ve ‘hotwired’ it and I think everything is back up — I’ll check everything more completely in the morning.
Update #3: Monday @ 8:15AM ET – My trusty monitoring system reminded me that I had to update my custom DNS server to point framechannel.com to my new server IP address; Thanks Nagios! This should be the last of the lingering problems with the service. Now all I have to do is figure out how to replace my firewall from 1,500 miles away. ;-(
I look forward to this election being over but not for the reason you may think. I look forward to being able to read my social media news feed without banging my forehead into my keyboard in frustration as I read something one of my ‘friends’ regurgitated from the various spew-fests that pass for political discourse these days.
SAY something! Fer freck’s sake do NOT just repeat/repost/share something posted by the PR machine of ‘your guy’. Ask questions! Demand detailed answers from EVERYONE. When they say ‘We have a plan…’ ask to see it. Do not let them gloss over it with something like “the details are still being worked out…” or “I’m not going to get into the details here…”; put-up or shut-up.
Question everything! Read everything and then make up your own mind — don’t let a punditainer tell you what to think. To do otherwise is truly un-patriotic.
I run twocompanies. I often get stuck in the process of improving my product at the expense of improving the business. This morning, while enjoying my coffee outside on a late-summer day, I came across an à propos blog post.
In addition to a slew of great marketing ideas he reminded me that when you run a company you have to think about ‘the business’ just as much as ‘the product’.
As to the title of this post; I can hear the code monkeys screaming at their screens and see the normal folk staring at the screen, heads slightly tilted with a “Huh?” face. Roughly translated it means that Success happens when the effort you spend on ‘the business’ is equal to what you expend on the ‘the product’.
For the code monkeys that are screaming at the inefficiency of the code I offer this explanation:
I am emphasising the fact that neither is greater than the other.
Although I have written code, in many languages, for a rather long time, I do not consider myself a software engineer. I write sometimes sloppy code that makes sense to me and get’s the job done.
I’m finally filling an profound gap in the functionality of FrameAlbum today… I’ve added a ‘Forgot Password’ function. Duh.
If you activate the function (just under the ‘Login’ button on the right side of the page) you will be asked to enter either your FrameAlbum username or, the email address you used when registering for the service.
The system will then email you a special link that will allow you to reset your password.
I’ve just released two new features to the website:
Tags – Include photos that have specific ‘tags’
Maximum Age – Limit the age of photos
Tags allow you to create topic specific feeds. For example, create a feed that includes only your pictures of ‘bunnies’. Or, perhaps you have tagged your photos to indicate it if is ‘horizontal’ or ‘vertical’ to match the orientation of your frame. The default is to not limit your feeds to specific tags.
You can also limit the age of the photos included in your feed. For example, if you wanted to only show your most recent photos you could set the maximum age to 90 days. If you do not specify a maximum age the system will default to 5 years. This default age may explain why some folks have empty feeds or are missing their older images.
These new features are available immediately to all registered users.
As always, questions are invited — let me know what you think!
Thanks for using FrameAlbum.
Digital Media and whatever else flows through my head…
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