And in the process, discovered a bottom margin bug!

I submitted the bug to a Trac ticket HERE and also documented the fix that would squash the bug flat and make Twenty Ten render the way it was supposed to which I will share here in my blog.

The Bug (in short):

The margin-bottom: 20px that is applied to the footer div triggers a well known CSS bug causing the 20px margin to be applied to the adjoining/bottom margin-touching wrapper div instead of the footer div.

That bottom margin you see at the bottom of the page where the end of the content wrapper should be touching the bottom of the screen?

That’s the bug.

The Fix (in short):

To correctly apply the 20px margin-bottom to the footer div and not accidentally to the wrapper div, the wrapper div needs to be given a 1px padding-bottom and the footer div needs to be given a 19px margin-bottom.

The padding applied to the wrapper where it touches the bottom of the footer container will trigger the margin-bottom to be rendered correctly for the footer and not the wrapper as the padding will add some ’separation’ between the two containers.

Another fix is to add a 1px border to the bottom of the wrapper and leave the 20px margin-bottom on the footer.

The border adds ‘content’ to the bottom of the wrapper which triggers the margin-bottom for the footer to be rendered correctly.

Why the Bug Happens:

If two adjoining containers share a common side (in this case, bottom of the footer and the bottom of the wrapper) and there is no padding or border to ’separate’ them (padding) or ‘add content’ (a border would ‘add content’ in this case) aside from a declared margin that affects that shared side (in this case, the footer’s margin), a bug is triggered where:

The margin applied to one container can be ‘doubled’ or ‘pushed out’ to the other container.

In other words, depending on how you see it, the margin either ‘doubles’ or gets ‘pushed out’ owing to this particular quirk of CSS.

Not surprisingly, this is related to the collapsing margins bug as well where two adjoining margins collapse into one margin.

Final Thoughts:

I know a lot of people don’t mind and/or don’t care about that bottom margin, but for those of you who like your footers to be stuck to the ‘foot’ of your viewing screen, this bug fix is for you.

Cheers and a big thank you to the WordPress team for such an awesome and versatile theme!

~ EMG

Shortly after I wrote that post, I spoke with Andrew from Media Temple about this matter and where he obviously was not allowed to go into situation specifics aside from what was publicly posted by Kyle, we were able to talk more in-depth about Media Temple’s policies and about specifics regarding theoretical situations which could result in the scenario that Kyle experienced. I aired my concerns – elaborated where necessary – and Andrew addressed them all quite thoroughly and we spoke at length about the various topics I had addressed in my previous blog posts.

At this point (actually, much earlier, but I have been unable to really sit down to write until now – sorry, Andrew!), I have to say that where I still have mild concerns about the potential ‘ease’ of going over resource allotment, I am satisfied with the results of the conversation and no longer have that sour taste in my mouth or the same misgivings I once had.

In case it wasn’t evident in previous posts or in case anyone needs a reminder, I will reiterate that my concerns were NOT regarding MT charging for overages (in other words, I wasn’t saying that MT shouldn’t charge for overages, period).

My greatest concern was how unexpectedly the overage-causing situation had happened (it was a total and complete accident and there was no prior indication that such a problem would happen), what the ramifications were (triggering the overage as the situation caused resource over-usage), what the implications might be (how easy would it be to go over resource allotment?), and then how MT INITIALLY handled the situation.

As a courtesy to Andrew and Media Temple, I will address the issues one more time and then close this particular ‘chapter’ of blog posts regarding Web Hosting Gone Wrong.

First and foremost:

In regards to resource allocation and overages, MT’s policies regarding overages and related fees is outlined on their site and users have the ability to track their usage of resources from their control panel.

The fees were NOT unexpected or necessarily unreasonable as they were accrued in accordance to usage policies, but the situation that caused the overage WAS quite a surprise (millions of 404 errors generated from the unexpected breaking of links due to site migration issues). For this reason, Kyle – as a new customer who had just finished with said site migration which had seemed to go just fine – was offered the waiving of the overage charges as a courtesy after further talks with customer service.

Initially, it wasn’t offered as policy is policy and the policy is no secret and neither is a user’s resource usage, but on further review of the situation and the circumstances, MT decided that the situation was very much accidental and even more unexpected and so gave an exception.

Seeing as how it was an unexpected accident (there had been no previous indication that something was wrong or broken) that grew rather suddenly to huge proportions and to someone who was still unfamiliar to MT’s system, I consider the gesture to be two things – courteous, and fair.

Also as a related aside, in regards to resource allocation and GPU usage and overages that can result in general, the resource allocation and GPU allotment is in place to ensure that all customers on the shared hosting get their ‘fair share’ of the resources. If one customer goes way over the allotment, that takes away from someone else’s resources, which isn’t fair for the other customers who are not going over their resource usage. So yeah, definitely not complaining about overages being charged when generally speaking.

And finally:

In regards to concerns about how ‘easy’ it seemed to go over resource usage (recall the stats and numbers I pulled from MT’s site in my previous post), Kyle’s situation was unique and uncommon in the sense of such an incident happening on a normal basis. Normal usage without generating millions of 404 errors would normally not be a cause for concern about overage.

Andrew also mentioned that there are some customers who know in advance that they will be going over and in such a case, they are prepared to pay for the related fees. Where some web hosts will lock down a domain for overage, MT allows the overage to happen without cost to the domain but at a cost to the user to compensate for the additional resources being used. Given the way their server structuring works, it makes sense and if nothing else, the terms of service are up-front.

In conclusion, where there seemed to be a bit of a tangle in regards to getting everything sorted out, everything has since been set straight.

With the forwardness of Andrew’s offer to speak with me about Media Temple’s policies and the situation described in this post and in previous posts (as much as is allowed, anyways, which I completely understand) and his courtesy offer to let me try Media Temple out as a web host so I can better understand what their service offers, I once again feel confident that Media Temple can provide users with quality service that is both transparent in policy and strong in fairness and communication.

Thank you Andrew for your time; I really appreciate it.

If there is anything you would like to add, please feel free to drop me a note and I will add it in this post.

~ EMG

The reason for that is because I am on a very impromptu hiatus right now.

Work and play (and blogging is a part of both for me) are currently on the backburner while I spend time with my family to help care for my mother who very recently suffered a hemorrhagic stroke on account of her previously unmanagable hypertension (overall health good, no risky lifestyle factors, etc which can be changed to help lower blood pressure) which had spiked up to 225 even WITH medications.

Geebuz.

Since it is only a minor stroke, things could certainly be worse, but dammit, things also could have been better, too!

So… yeah.

EMG over and out.

NEVER.

However.

Due to the old RegisterFly fiasco (not my fault!) that happened back in the timespan of 2005-2007, I had a handful of domains that I had been maintaining at RegisterFly get pushed on to GoDaddy while one domain ended up with eNom. Several got moved elsewhere (DreamHost, here I come!) while I let others whose purposes had expired… expire.

Also.

Due to working with various people over the years – paid, voluntary, because we’re friends, and otherwise – I have been forced to interact with GoDaddy as the go-between fix-it and fix-up person.

But those incidents and instances aside, I myself would never – if possible – choose GoDaddy.

Why?

Good grief, but where do I start?

I know! How about in alphabetical order?

ADVERTISING PRACTICES

I really dislike how the offsite advertising in general (TV ads, ads elsewhere on the web) frequently reminds me about how questionable I view GoDaddy’s services to be. In relation, I also really dislike seeing Danica Patrick’s and Bob Parsons’ faces plastered everywhere on the site.

Seeing faces on the landing page, fine. Good idea, even, as it’s part of the branding and marketing et al. But EVERYWHERE?! I DON’T need their faces to sell me MORE domains or whatever other web package is being offered! In fact, the faster I can get through the pages upon pages (see the Web UI and UX bit for more information) of advertising and upselling to get to what I need to get to, the happier I would be!

So that’s one thing.

The other thing is this:

Due to the kinds of advertisements GoDaddy has run and continues to run, seeing Danica’s face everywhere in particular automatically matches her – and the GoDaddy service in general – to a pair/multiple pairs! of prominently displayed High Definition-quality breasts.

Coupled with the frequent and liberal showcasing of the GoDaddy Girls, the word GoDaddy on its own leaves a taste of ‘what the hell kind of a service is this place offering anyways – free email porno with every purchase?’ in my mouth.

It also doesn’t help that Parsons’ blog features ’sexy talk’ (viewer discretion advised!) related to the GoDaddy Girls and girls in general and that the advertisements in the sidebar and elsewhere that link to his blog often utilizes titillating wording to attract attention and the content of such blog posts often involves the objectifying of women.

Making mental comparisons of Parsons to that guy who owns that Bunny Ranch in Nevada, is NOT, in my opinion, good for a professional image for someone who is the head of a web hosting and domain registrar company.

Are you selling an online porno mag or are you selling web hosting and domain registration services? Maybe it’s just me, but I prefer to keep porno with porno and web hosting et al related services with web hosting et al.

Personally, the mental comparison always makes me wonder if I can dare to trust the operation of a company that deals with something so technically involved to someone like that.

RegisterFly, whom I mentioned in passing in my opening paragraphs, had a founder whose professionalism and know-how had increasing reason to be questioned in the lifetime of his ownership of the company. My experience with the company – once rock solid – was all downhill after the first few years. Coincidence? Nope. Correlation.

Do I want to repeat that experience?

No thank you!

Furthermore, where I’d figure that a guy like Parsons couldn’t care less about me hosting all manners of porno sites using his service, do I really want my professional career be tied in with a company that exudes such a feel?

My male clients might not have anything to say about it, but I know my female clients might take issue and I would hardly be able to blame them. As is, I have had more than a few women ask me if there are other hosting options aside from GoDaddy as they dislike how strongly women are objectified by the company and dislike the company’s consequently ’seemingly unprofessional’ tone.

I want someone to take me and my services seriously; not question my ability to make sound judgment calls based on the fact that I am trying to save money by using a service whose advertisements make it look more like an online Bunny Ranch than an honest-to-goodness reliable web host and domain registrar.

My answer?

No thank you.

Listen. If I want my visual eye candy, I’d get it elsewhere – NOT from a web hosting and domain registrar!

Also. If I wanted to be a customer/client under a Hugh Hefner wannabe, I’d go for Hugh Hefner and his Playboy franchise. At least I KNOW that I am signing up for pornography and should therefore expect eye candy at every which click!

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

I have been on the telephone with their customer support on and off for the last few years – for myself, for my clients – and no matter the reason I call in I ALWAYS get someone who is trying to upsell me with services I DON’T NEED and WILL NEVER NEED because the service that it is associated with is a service that I DON’T and WON’T use.

‘Frustrating’ doesn’t cover what I feel when I have called in with a very urgent problem only to be greeted by an upsell.

Who am I talking to – a credit card company?!

Apparently so.

And in relation to that, is:

UPSELL PRACTICES

Anyone who has ever tried performing an action so simple as renewing a domain will know what I mean when I say the upselling that goes on in the process of trying to perform a single task is multiple pages long.

From trying to sell you other related domain names or the same domain name except under different TLDs to selling you privacy protection to selling you email services to selling you all manners of web hosting services and things related to web hosting, the number of pages you need to click through to get to the final page is TOO MANY.

And if that weren’t enough, on your confirmation page is yet ANOTHER chance to purchase something else!

Aside from simply being annoyed to all hell with the upselling, what I really dislike is this:

The upselling content is small-fonted and all cram-jam-packed into each page. If you’re not careful, you very well could end up signing up for something else before you realize what is going on and you could very well end up NOT completing the transaction you were trying to complete.

I HATE how GoDaddy forces its customers to endure page after page of upselling to get to the end point.

Do you want my money or not? Would you rather have someone give you their money to you in peace or would you rather have them accidentally buy (or not buy!) something they didn’t want (wanted)?

Apparently the latter.

No thanks.

To me, that falls under the category of ’shady business practices’.

To use DreamHost as a contrasting example, they offer me all manners of options in the side panel of my account control panel. If I need it, I click it and it opens the service/feature page in question and I have an option to purchase. Additionally, non-sidebar informational text-based links to other services are logically placed in accordance to the service/feature I am utilizing or maintaining. And, if I contact customer support to ask a question about databases they are NOT going to randomly try to sell me an SSL.

Thank goodness!

WEBSITE UI and UX

This goes hand in hand with the ’shady business practices’ and the whole ‘GoDaddy’s advertising makes me question the nature of the services and the quality of the services offered’ topics I covered earlier.

If a potential or current customer can’t access – much less navigate – through a website that loads slower than molasses, then how are they supposed to do any business?

It’s slow on a good day. It’s buggy on a bad day. It crashes my browsers on the worst days.

Additionally, with the way all the damned upselling and advertising is placed helter-skelter EVERYWHERE on every page, how the hell does anyone know where to look for the right services and features to begin with?

I can only manage because I memorized the location of everything and because I’ve had years of dealing with user unfriendly UIs which provide terrible UXs.

How a first-timer manages to get everything set up perfectly the first time, I have no idea.

Now.

After I’ve said all that, I’m sure you’re wondering what could possibly be right after all the things I said were wrong.

Admittedly, as much as I sometimes want to say that GoDaddy gives the impression of nothing but trouble, there ARE a few things that GoDaddy has done right.

The MySpace Username and Password List Incident

There was a lot of hullaballoo about GoDaddy’s takedown of a site that had a list of MySpace usernames and passwords posted (the site archives mailing lists) with people complaining about the takedown being an infringement of the freedom of speech.

Since when does Freedom of Speech include posting usernames and passwords? An act which under almost ANY and ALL TOSes of ANY remotely reputable internet-based service or site is consider illegal and punishable?

Good for GoDaddy and even better for them standing up to their stance on the issue and reaffirming their stance on using their services to perpetuate illicit activities!

The RegisterFly Incident

GoDaddy acquired a whole bunch of domains as a result of the RegisterFly fiasco and during the time where I had to wrangle with figuring out what was going to happen to my various domains that had gotten split up between two different registrars, GoDaddy customer support was very helpful in helping me get everything back in order.

I can’t complain about the upselling because it was the perfect opportunity to do so at the time and they handled my questions and situation well, given the enormity of the fiasco.

To that, I give my sincerest thanks and that leads me to my closing thought:

I wish GoDaddy’s business model didn’t rub me the wrong way as much as it does, but I know as well as everyone else that GoDaddy as it exists now in the form that I on a whole disagree with so much is here to stay for a while and I will just have to agree to disagree with them.

They’re not a bad company, and where I sure don’t agree with their practices, I’m sure others do and will and maybe even encourage it.

In all honesty, I can see the business-related reasoning behind why they do what they do and in that particular sense, I can’t really ‘fault’ the company for its direction. Heavy in-your-face advertising sells. Sometimes really grates on the people whom they are trying to advertise to, but it sells. Sex sells. Sometimes alienates a potential marketshare in the process, but it sells. Aggressive upselling sells. Sometimes sells with disastrous results, but it still sells.

All in all, different strokes for different folks, and since we’re talking about GoDaddy, I think I can get away with that phrasing.

I mean, it’s GoDaddy – c’mon.

~ EMG

EDIT: A follow-up post has been made to this. Please READ THIS for the final update and the resolution.

To refresh your memory (or simply read if you never caught it in the first place), click HERE.

Apparently, according to Kyle Matthews whom this incident happened to, there has been a resolution offered by Media Temple – namely, $6XX amount of overage fees are being/will be/were waived.

Click HERE to read his update!

According to Kyle’s post, Media Temple sent him an email shortly after his blog post appeared asking him to call them back in regards to the “unfortunate circumstance of the issue”.

Funny, that (in my opinion anyways), when the original customer support emails had stated that nothing could be done when Kyle had first asked.

But.

Media Temple DID get back in touch and did acknowledge at least part of the gaffe on their part – good for them! That’s called customer service gone right. At least… part way.

But.

Like Kyle’s blog post states, it still leaves a sour taste in my mouth, too, and mostly because of what I had explained in my earlier post.

A company trumpeting the robustness of their service and backing it up with percentages and statistics and saying that only 0.3% and 0.03% of users (basically, VERY VERY FEW for the first and out of a random 10,000 for the second!) ever experience overage problems ONLY to be keeled over by the 2 million 404 Apache errors from one website which generated a crapload of overage charges just…

It just doesn’t sit well with me at all in any way, shape, or form ESPECIALLY knowing that once upon a not very long time ago at all, the same site had done just fine on DreamHost’s shared web hosting service.

DreamHost talks about what they offer in their services, sure, and you can go poke at their fine print if you want to, and you can read up on their thoughts regarding ‘unlimited’ this, that, and the other, and they even regularly post status updates on their servers and all but nowhere have I seen the sort of reputation/credibility-building (more like hyping, really!) that Media Temple posted on their FAQs page.

And DH managed to host the site just fine.

Blegh.

So yeah.

Resolution posted!

… But the sour aftertaste is still there and I still can’t help but wonder just what kinds of sites those 10,000 were that MT randomly picked out which generated a grand total of 0.03% of sites going over their resources.

I guess trust (or something like it) once broken is hard to fix and I guess after all the hype, I’m not sure what’s ‘realistic’ to expect from MT or not after seeing something like this happen.

… We’ll see.

~ EMG

Thanks to AddThis and my print-friendly CSS stylesheet, this blog is officially ‘Print Friendly’!

Remember what I said about the AddThis Printing feature printing out entire blogs instead of specific blog posts?

Well, I found out from the AddThis support team – thanks! – that AddThis has a specific Printing function called Printer Friendly which can enable a specific blog post to be printed out of a whole page of blog posts given the proper setup.

If you click on the ‘Share’ button at the bottom of this post, you will notice a Print Friendly option. If you click it, it will open up the blog post the button is associated with in a new viewing window/tab and will allow you to print that one post rather than doing the default ‘Print Whole Web Page’ function.

Pretty neat, huh?

At least… I think so!

Thanks again AddThis team; I really appreciate the tip and I’m really glad you implemented the Print Friendly functionality!

~ EMG

Because each of these comments is literally a full screen’s height long and mostly contains text which I cannot read (language, huge blocks of text and links, AND tiny font sizes), shuffling through more than a pageful to make sure legit comments make it through to me is honestly a serious pain on my EYES and can trigger migraines on a bad day.

In an effort to cut back on this sort of spam in my spam queue and in an attempt to not alienate any of my potential commentors, I have installed a plugin called Conditional CAPTCHA.

What this plugin does is this: If the Akismet spam identifier identifies a comment as a potential spam (yes, the plugin works alongside Akismet!), it will present to the person who is submitting the comment a fill-in-the-blank/text-based CAPTCHA.

The commentor will be asked to identify and type in two digits (eg: first digit and third digit) from a string of text-based digits and if they type in the right ones, the comment will pass and if they type in the wrong ones or don’t type at all, the comment gets auto-deleted.

It is not an ideal solution, but as I struggle with a status migraine, it is something I am going to implement until I can find a better alternative.

If anyone has any ideas or comments, please share them!

And to reiterate: The CAPTCHA ONLY shows up when Akismet has already identified the comment as potentially spammy.

~ EMG

I initially created the Bulletin Board post to serve as… well… a bulletin board for people to catch up on the most recent administrative updates without having to dig through my blog.

I still like the idea, but…

Look at how long the Bulletin Board post is getting!

I don’t want it to take up a third of my blog page, but that’s exactly what it is doing. On the other hand, I also still want to serve up my most recent administrative updates all in one post block area.

Ideas?

One of the more feasible/do-able ideas I was considering is to code a WordPress-specific PHP loop that would list posts from my Administration category and then display the list in the block that I currently label as Bulletin Board.

This would offer visitors to my site a listing of all the most current administrative posts while also cleaning up some textual clutter.

The downside would be the necessity to alter a theme file in order to insert such a post as the Sticky Post I am using now would be replaced with a permanent ‘post’ that posts according to a PHP loop.

Hmmm…

~ EMG

Over here it sure isn’t!

So after a few long months of having very empty Rabbit Hole and Giving Props widgets staring at me in the face asking me, “Why haven’t you worked on your links yet?”, I finally sat myself down to wrangle around with them and only them.

Three hours later (actually five, but the first two hours were kinda scattered around)…

Behold – my Giving Props list! *points to the sidebar Giving Props widget block*

What do you think?

The list isn’t fully finished yet as there are a few people and things that I need to add on, but you get the general idea, right?

Maaan, but the list ended up being a lot longer than I thought it would be and it also ended up taking up more of my time and concentration than I thought it might!

Initially, the list was going to be a simple list of text-only links like the list of links in a typical Blogroll widget block (to maintain cohesion with the rest of my site which is very minimalistic in terms of graphics), but after thinking about ‘giving back to the community’…

I decided that maybe I could turn my simple Giving Props link block into a personal project to ‘give back’ to the people, services, and places who/that have helped me along my journey as a WordPress junkie, front-end web developer and designer, and blogger.

And that’s where all those icons/buttons come in.

To show my appreciation for these people, services, and places, I ended up creating sixteen – 16 so far! – unique slimline buttons for each and every one of these people, services, and places and boy oh boy, but did I have one heck of a blast doing so or what!

There are still more to come – there are still a few people yet whom I want to put in the list, but haven’t decided on the graphic for – but I think I’m doing good so far.

After I get the others done, I will officially send them off to their ‘owners’ and hopefully, I will hear back from some of the people and get some feedback on what they like or what they don’t like.

*crosses fingers*

… I hope nobody takes offense to what I’ve done.

~ EMG

You know what happened?

I ended up Printing the entire blog – ACK!

Thankfully, I was only printing to PDF and the blog in question was my own and I have my blog settings set so that one page can only display a certain number of posts at any given time.

But… still.

The whole blog!

Man oh man.

I sent a support ticket to the AddThis team; hopefully I’ll get some sort of answer or workaround for this issue.

I can’t imagine that I might be the only person to have this issue unless… I’m the only person who tacks on the AddThis feature to every blog post on a page of posts?

We’ll see.

I’ll post again with more news when I find out what’s going on, but I figured I should let everyone know what’s going on in case someone else wants to try and Print a single post.

~ EMG