This is an clientraw version of a banner that I use a lot of places. Unlike the one that I use elsewhere, this obtains all its info from the single clientraw.txt file. Backgrounds have a beaded frame around them.
One item missing which is now available in the clientrawextra.txt file, is the WD Version number. The problem is that second file is quite large compared to the initial clientraw.txt file. Pulling it just to get the WD version doesn’t make much sense unless you are going to use the other data…
So minus that and the current rate of change for the temp, the following signature banners will be available soon…
Simlar options as before with a much larger title area than before. You can include your URL or a “Slogan”…
These are small, about 7k - 10k in size. PNG images.
The ability to get the number of hits to the icon you are subscribed to will be a free addon to any of the existing subscribed icons.
The information is already there in the logs, I just have to setup a procedure to pull it and make it accessible to a url. It will most likely won’t be a live count but more like a daily updated counter. XXX hits since midnight …
The price of the signature banner will be like the rest… $5 for 6 months service.
Turned out to be a lot harder than I thought since they are configured a tad bit different. The scripts that generate the graphics didn’t work quite the same there and it took a couple hours to figure out what was going on so that I could fix it.
www.TnetWeather.com is next… but will be later on today as I ran out of gas… was a very long day.
Yes, second that. Opened a can of worms, but if I’m reading this correctly, it sounds like you needed more reliable hosting. Hope you found the answer with the new hosting company.
I’ve been watching the Wx-Host.com site very carefully since a lot of people are using the auto-generated Icons from it. For most of the week, it seemed to somehow miss all the problems that the other sites were having but I knew that if it spread, I’d have to act pretty fast.
When I got home tonight (actually yesterday night now) and found that all the sites were dark, I activated the new hosting account that I had chosen to at least temporarily use for the service.
It was the first site I moved over and I change DNS and found out very quickly it wasn’t going to work the same… I then switched dns back since the old provider was back online again and at least it could continue serving until I could fix the new site. That happened about 4 hours ago, so I switched it back to the new site.
The dns had a 4 hour ttl… so it takes a while to switch it over unless you have the means to flush your own dns server.
I just got up about 40 minutes ago to make sure it had switched okay and it looks okay.
I just started the file uploads for tnetweather.com to the new site, but the dns is not yet pointing there yet. There is a ton of data on that site so it will take a while.
I really appreciate everyones patience through this … its amazing how a solid provider for a fairly long time can all of a sudden go poof… but they are really having problems over there.
I should have everything moved over to the new site by tomorrow (actually today) late night.
We had another nice thunderstorm again tonight… not much rain but a lot of lightning again… If you got to put up with humidity, at least get a show for it at night.
BTDTGTTS. You can’t flush the worldwide DNS though. The TTL is used as a cache timeout on most DNS servers, so 4 hours is how long it takes and there’s nothing you can do to improve this. If you’re planning ahead you can reduce the TTL to just a few minutes ahead of the change and cope with the extra DNS hits whilst you make the change. Once everything is stable bump the TTL back up to whatever you normally run with.
The problem with the ttl is that I had no access to change it. So if someone already has the zone… they will have to wait until it times out. Normally I bring ttl down to 30 mins when I know I’m going to move a site. but I didn’t have that options, heck I couldn’t even get to the site at all.
I just switched over tnetweather.com… almost everything is up already. Looks like wx-host has the old zone still for the site so it is still grabbing the old clientraw for me. Everyone else looks okay except Glencarse, Tayside, UK that is apparently offline right now.
By the time I get up in the morning it should be getting the right one…
The problem is that even with emergency moves you still need 4 hours to change the TTL to 30 minutes My TTL’s are set at 8 hours (I think), but if my hosting company goes belly up it will take a lot more than 8 hours to get a new server provisioned and re-built. My hosting company seem very reliable (so far) and as they’re not in the cheap end of the market where the competition for free or nearly free hosting is fierce I’m not too worried about them.
Got a note today that due to the problems they have had, they are moving all the sites back to the original servers.
This means they will have a bunch more down time as the reason for moving was problems they had at that center… etc…
I’ve been with them for 2 years. they have been rock solid up until now. They apparently made some really big mistakes in the server move, by doing too many different things at once.
Except for the WX-host site which has some really custom scripts that I had to redo a bit, most of the others are very easy to move.
I can setup the new site on the new server and simply ftp the contents up, check it a bit and then activate the dns for the site and it will be done. I’m going to redo the stuff to make it more portable this weekend.
Worst case, I move some of them to my own server… but that one is a bit old and slow.
Can’t wait to get my main site up at my home office… that will make life a lot easier.
I have a wireless T1 going in. I will start out the first month with 1mb and bump it up to full after testing is done.
I can upgrade it up to 6mb easily just by thowing them more money, but I doubt I will go beyond a full T1.
The tower is about 3 blocks from my house so it will radiate us well :microwave: :shockingzap:
If I ever get away from fixing stuff that should be already working… I plan on adding a notification script to the icon system that would send a one time mail or sms message to a subscriber when the system can’t access the clientraw file or finds that it is not being updated.
It would have to do a lot of checks to make sure that IT is not the cause of the problem and that it really is not being updated on the other end.
My TTL’s are set at 8 hours (I think), but if my hosting company goes belly up it will take a lot more than 8 hours to get a new server provisioned and re-built. My hosting company seem very reliable (so far) and as they’re not in the cheap end of the market where the competition for free or nearly free hosting is fierce I’m not too worried about them.