Not Happy Jan

Hi David

Thanks for that and I was not having a dig at you personally. As long as it does not die for about the next 4 hours, as that is how long it will take to get the next Blog up.



Cheers


Stephen

Gee David and Michelle
Was it you that shut down all my computers at work this morning? I had to show my people how to sell parts and write out an invoice, these young people , i dont know....

Hi David

It did not take 4 hours to load the Blog like I thought........


It was nearly 6 1/2 hours the second time, so I must be crazy with the final submit press at 2.20am this morning.

Perhaps you could look at a way that you can upload from my end multiple images at once to make the job a lot quicker. The process was suffering from a number of little bugs last night, at times I had over 30 images loaded at a time, I would hit the preview button and hey presto, the newly uploaded images would just vanish.

In the end I would only do no more than 6 - 9 images before submitting, then going in to edit and adding more images. In that way I was cutting down on more lost time and having to reload the same lost images.

The next question is what happens the images uploaded and lost in cyber space, are they doubled up on your server?



Cheers



Stephen

Stephen, Gee 6.5hours and lost images. When I do a big one I actually load 5 images at a time and Submit the page as I go. It will publish unfinished work but you can title it Work In Progress or something as you submit - once you are done change the title. Anyway when I am rewriting Mobile support in the blogs I have a number of plans - including the ability to edit before publish, and off-line edit an upload (does not help now but will be better soon).

As for the missing images - if you have the pic loaded and saved in the little window - that means it is on the server, if this happens and it is not in the blog then it will be duplicated - I will have to run a process and clean up the images. I did this once but as I reuse images from blog to blog i.e. copy the [gi xxxx] from one blog to another I found I clobbered my own blogs be deleting images from one when they were used in another - I will work on a clean up program again when I get into the blog rewrite and will run it through the system to clean up any duplicates.

Sorry it took so long and caused you problems - I really appreciate the work you guys put into writing these, they make for excellent reading and research material for all. Well done.
David

I have had reported that the application code server had a firmware issue that caused the extended downtime last night. I have requested that this be corrected urgently. Hopefully this will be the resolution.
David

Obviously you don't watch TV ..... this was a quote from from a clever Telstra ad a few years back www.youtube.com/watch?v=2akt3P8ltLM

What are we going to do with them Tony.

Bill must be one of the "U" Generation. Look out. Incoming. Boom! Missed me Bill.

That one is a classic.

Bob, don't you have to upload the pictures individually?
Kevin

Hi Bob

The problem is not in the wording, but in the uploading of the images.

i never write a live Blog, it would take until the cows come home. It is the same as the photo captions. I also write up the story and then add the images. As it was I lost an hours worth of uploading, and then another 2 hours waiting for the site to come back on air.

I started again from fresh for the second time and I was not going to stop until they were all loaded. I must be insane, as the final image was loaded and the final submit button pressed at 2.20 am this morning - or in crazy terms, the second time it took over 6 hours to load the full Blog and images.

I have ADSL and it is not slow at all, but it just takes a long time to load the image, add the captions and so on. The only way that things could fasten the job would be the ability to load multiple images and name them at a later time.

Have a look at the new Blog, it is my biggest ever photo rich one yet, with over 240 images.



Cheers



Stephen

Stephen, 240 images may be a bit of a problem it will take ages for people to download and read a blog entry of this length. I have just opened it and it is great by the way but does take around 30-60 seconds to load and takes 375 requests back to the server and nearly 500KB (compressed) to download. Not a problem really on high speed links but on Mobile or older ADSL 1 may be a bit of a pain. I will have to see if there is another way to maybe load large blogs in pieces as you scroll down or something. This is pushing the envelope on what the blogs system was designed for but I think it looks great, you have done en excellent job - leave it to me to sort out the problems and make it better for you to use.

As for the pics there are over 900 loaded into the system under that blog entry id so yes there are a great number of dups. I think I will also mod the uploader to allow multi and directly save rather than caption each on the way through. Anyway I will sort this when I get to the blogs system.

David

Hi David

Just tested opening the blog on our Telstra Next G USB mobile broadband...about 45 secs...quite amazed actually.......because I expected much worse...I am more trhan happy with that download time..

particularly as our signal is not the best out here and i have had to put a little home made yagi on the roof to stop the drop outs

Well done to Stephen..........

cheers

Hi Stephen and David,

Wow you crammed a lot into your Cairns visit, and its good to see a comprehensive write up. I share your frustrations somewhat having had the system drop out recently while up loading photos. I have learned to get around this using the following steps:

- writing and editing the blog in word, then its a simple copy and paste to get the text in;
- breaking the text into smaller blogs, aiming for a max of about a couple of pages of text before photos are added. That's about as much as most folk will read in one sitting. Most magazine articles these days are probably about the 1000-1500 word mark?
- uploading the text with something at the top like "more Photos to come", then uploading a few photos at a time, as time permits. This way if something happens to the site I haven't lost much time. Captions I think can be added and edited later, as can supplementary text under the captions.
- maybe I have too much time on my hands but I like to edit out the black bits around the photos - quick to do but makes it look better.

David, maybe a few pointers somewhere about how to write a blog. One of the things that puts me off reading some blogs is the lack of paragraphs. It really is hard to read a big block of unbroken text, especially if its not broken up with photos.

Stephen, Im delighted to see that you could visit the old Chillagoe smelter site. When we were there last year we heard radio reports that the site was to be closed to visitors, and our visit actually coincided with a site visit by a lot of heritage and parks people considering the future of the site. Glad the site is still open and hope it stays that way.

Cheers,

Val

Hi bungarra and Val

Thanks for the reply, and yes it was a big job, with Fiona singing out a couple of times during the night "when are you coming to bed" LOL

I will now limit the size of the Blogs and as you suggest Val, the Big one will be broken up into smaller Blogs.


Cheers


Stephen

Hi people,

I have a few large blogs - and would prefer to be able to continue to do so that way.
Most of my blogs are trip reports and Val, I know can understand what you are saying about breaking them up into smaller sections however covering one trip into several blogs I believe would break up the continuity of the write up.

I agree also that blogs without paragraphs are hard to read and have "skipped" over a few like that wherein I would have read through them if otherwise. I'm not sure there's much that can be done about that.

Before blogs on Exploroz we all used to put the content into the forum; having to split the content into smaller sections doesn't fit well with me. If I have something to say, then I would prefer to say it in one go!!

The download times I agree will increase with the size of the blog however if someone really wishes to read your blog, then those times become academic.

Cheers
Alan

Hi Grant,

Yes computer problems can be a real brain tester, that's for sure.

I am sorry that I did not get back to your other email, but have been busy getting ready for another great desert trip next week.


Cheers


Stephen

Hi Min

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

It has been a while since I have seen you on the forum, so I trust things are fine with you.

We all learn from our mistake, so my next Blog that will be very soon ( heading off this Saturday for another interesting Desert Trip, that will make great reading and of interest to many here on the forum)

I will have less writing, but lots of photos and that them describe the trip.

Regards


Stephen