MikeCann.co.uk » Websites - MikeCann.co.uk - mikey see, mikey do!

mikecann.co.uk moved.. again.. too!

admin — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 20:44:56 +0000

Well as my previous post was about how I had moved my personal presence I thought I would mention the move of my virtual presence too.

For a while I have been hosting my sites on Slicehost, and things having been going okay. Slicehost however is a basic VPS that simply gives you root access and then you are expected to know what to do next. I spent a long time setting it up in the beginning following various tutorials. I learnt alot of Linux along the way but unfortunately I dont think im ever going to have the time to learn enough to maintain this box, especially now that I have 7 domains of my own and am hosting two by other people.

So I recently started looking for a better solution. Thats when my partner in crime olip.co.uk recommendation that I checkout Web Fusion, so I did and was mightily impressed. For a very similar price to Slicehost I get a much bigger box with much more features, and ofcourse the awesome Plesk 9.0 admin tool.

So the last few days I have been moving over, its gone pretty smooth but there have been a coupple of growing pains, which others may wish to learn from:

Shared Rather Than Exclusive Hosting

If you wish to be able to create new clients using Plesk then allow those clients to create domains you must remember to set your VPS as “shared” rather than “exclusive” right at the beginning before doing anything. I found out the hard way that if you make domains on an “Exclusive” IP VPS then you can no longer set that IP as “shared” and therefore clients cannot make domains. The solution I was forced to take was to ring support (which was generally helpful, ive seen worse *cough* BT *cough*) and they were able to sort it for me.

Mod_Rewrite and .htaccess

This blog is wordpress and I wanted the pretty perma-links that WordPress is capable of so http://www.mikecann.co.uk/about/ rather than http://www.mikecann.co.uk/?page=about. To achieve this I tried many different things before I hit on the correct solution which was to use FTP to modify the permissions on the httpdocs folder to 777 then go to the perma-links section of the WordPress settings and allow WordPress to setup .htaccess for me! I then just went back and changed the permissions back to 750, simples!

The Case of The Transitional Doctype

admin — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:44:37 +0000

I took a little break from my ‘top secret’ project (more on this coming soon) this evening to do some much needed repair work on one of my flash games portals www.worldsbestflashgames.com.

Top of my list was the fact that the index page doesn’t render correctly in IE7. What makes it odd is the fact that the category pages which are essentially identical to the index page rendered fine.This is what it looked like:

Normally when you hear that there is an issue with a site on IE and not on FF or other browsers you automatically assume its CSS, and so did I. After stripping the site down to its bear bones however, comparing the index page against the category page I will still getting this oddness.

To cut a long story short I worked my way up from the bottom of the page to the top until I reaced the very top line:

This line was the only line that differed in the index to the category page, which read:

So I took out the “Transitional” and low and behold it worked!

No idea what Transitional does, but I hope this helps someone else out in the future!

Domains..

admin — Wed, 13 May 2009 11:46:21 +0000

Noticed yesterday that http://www.particleplayground.com was available so it got my thought train going. I wonder if…

The first step, as someone pointed out, was to buy the domain. So I am now the proud owner of http://www.particleplayground.com and http://www.particleplayground.co.uk, yey for me!

I probably wont do anything with them but you never know!