Look into the Pink Eye!

We run quite a few websites from our fairly modest servers which we host at the highly-recommended eUKHost. Most of these are websites that are well used throughout the year but don't get huge jumps in traffic. However we do have a few clients that have occasional big spikes in demand, for example when there's a product launch or big annual event. This can cause problems with the server, as when it is working hard and slows down for one website, it slows down for all the others on that particular machine.

This graph shows traffic in GB throughout the month of September. Guess which day the BWPA winners were announced!

Up to now we've juggled server resources by hand and managed to keep things going most of the time. But this year we knew we faced a bigger challenge with the announcement of the winners of the British Wildlife Photography Awards. This major national competition is entirely web-based, and we manage and host the website. Last year the announcement of the winners nearly - but not quite - toppled our server. This year we knew it was a much more popular competition, with many thousands more images uploaded. So we were expecting a big rush. It would never do for the BWPA website to fail just at its moment of glory. So we put in place a contingency plan that we hadn't tried before, the use of a service called CoralCDN, also known as Coral Cache. It worked like a charm. The website continued live throughout the two days with a 1500% spike in traffic when it was featured on the front page of BBC Online, National Geographic, Bild, The Times, the Guardian and many many more. Read on to see how we did it.

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External link: http://www.coralcdn.org/

It's an unusual problem but a frustrating one. A client had sent us some emails from an Outlook system which had images attached to them we needed. Straightforward? Not this time! The emails came as attachments, with no filetype, and could only be opened as text documents. Needless to say we don't have Microsoft Outlook running so we couldn't open them that way. The text documents were huge, and looked something like this:


Content-Type: image/jpeg; name="Six-spot Burnet moth.JPG"
Content-Description: Six-spot Burnet moth.JPG
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="Six-spot Burnet moth.JPG";
size=416910; creation-date="Sun, 25 Jul 2004 11:33:28 GMT";
modification-date="Sun, 25 Jul 2004 11:33:28 GMT"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64

/9j/4R/+RXhpZgAASUkqAAgAAAAJAA8BAgAGAAAAegAAABABAgAUAAAAgAAAABIBAwABAAAAAQAA
ABoBBQABAAAAoAAAABsBBQABAAAAqAAAACgBAwABAAAAAgAAADIBAgAUAAAAsAAAABMCAwABAAAA
AQAAAGmHBAABAAAAxAAAAGoHAABDYW5vbgBDYW5vbiBQb3dlclNob3QgQTgwAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
ALQAAAABAAAAtAAAAAEAAAAyMDA0OjA3OjI1IDEwOjMzOjMwAB8AmoIFAAEAAACGAwAAnYIFAAEA


..and so on for another 600Kb. How could we get this image out of the email? A solution was at hand. Read on to see what it was.

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External link: http://www.etresoft.com/decoder.html

We've just started using 37signals Campfire collaboration software for a client. They wanted a private chatroom where a group of individuals could have online discussions and upload files to share. It was a fairly corporate organisation, and so needed to be fairly straightforward - no fancy avatars or smileys are necessary. Campfire seemed to fit the bill very well, so we signed up and the discussions got going.

It's been an interesting experience. As ever with new stuff, there's good and bad points. So, how did it go?

Set-up
It's all web-based so setting up an account is easy enough. I asked some support questions by email and within 8 hours a helpful response came back. No technical skill is required.

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External link: http://campfirenow.com/

Let's assume you're using Windows, and, like us monkeys at Pinkeye Graphics, you also use Googlemail or Gmail for email.

If so, you might well want to have a convenient shortcut to Gmail on your desktop - you know, just like the one that used to go to Outlook Express, all those years ago? In fact, for those changing over to Gmail from Outlook or a similar POP email client, having an email icon in the quick launch bar is a nice bit of comfort. Even if it just opens up a browser it still retains some of that offline look and feel which is reassuring and easy to use.

Find out below how to make this happen in a few brief clicks of the mouse.

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This really annoys me. When installing a new program, you get language options. The default is always something called "US English". Well, clearly that isn't me. So invariably I take the trouble to change the default to the only other English option: something called "International English".

International English? I'm not sure what that is. Nobody would ever describe themselves as an International English speaker - I certainly don't. The word 'international' is actually being used here as a euphemism for 'foreign'. US English is foreign to me, but I wouldn't be inconsiderate enough to make any US English-speakers describe themselves as foreign.

Perhaps we should just call International English 'English'. And make it the default. If anyone wants to specify a country they're welcome to do so, but if not, just leave it plain and unqualified.