Voodoochilli Design

Last Thursday was a very stressful day for many web designers in the UK, and we were no exception. In fact, I would argue that we had a worst time than most. Bluesquare, based in Maidenhead, is one of the UK’s largest datacenters. For those that don’t know a datacenter is a large complex of servers – literally home of the internet. On Thursday last week, an incident involving a fire alarm and strict safety protocols resulted in the datacenter being shut down. Twitter was a hive of activity with reports of fire brigades and less serious ones such as people claiming their websites were on fire. Regardless, millions of websites were offline for several hours.

Although many people found the whole incident rather amusing, this was not the case for us. Not only were all of our websites offline for over 5 hours – we were being represented in a rather important meeting at the time. Teams of people from the UK, Romania, Slovenia, Greece and Germany had all flown to Athens along with members from The Culture Programme of the European Union who were funding our latest project. They would have collectively travelled thousands of miles, and instead of viewing the private beta of our website, would have witnessed a rather dull “Server not found” page. We were not happy. More importantly, they were not happy! Several feverish and rather expensive phone calls later and we managed to explain that there was nothing we could do and it was simply a case of waiting it out.

BlueSqaure - one of the UK's largest datacenters.

Eventually, with no sign of the site coming back online any time soon, the meeting was postponed until the following day. It didn’t end there though! Halfway through the demonstration of our website  the internet cut out due to ISP strikes in Greece! In the end, the meeting finally concluded and most of the partner countries involved in the project got a fairly decent look at the website.

It is a fact that with technology, sometimes things just go wrong and there is nothing you can do about it. It is just life and you just have to take the rough with the smooth. At the time it may not seem like things will get better but they generally do. The internet outage suffered by us and many web professionals was a freak incident not likely to happen again any time soon, and we can happily say that all of our websites are up and running smoothly (including this one) and the project mentioned above is progressing very nicely and should be launched in a couple of weeks.

Jumping on the proverbial band wagon, I recently started to use Twitter. I quite like this format which is limited to just 160 charters, microblogging I believe it’s called. It suits our busy lifestyles just to write a few sentences when something comes to mind. I find it interesting that it uses 140 characters instead of another number, say 200. Presumably this is because of the fact that mobile phones are limited to 160 letters, and this leaves enough space for the entire message to be sent by text. I find this curious because with all of the advances in technology since SMS messaging was standardised in 1985, why hasn’t this number increased? I think we can safely put this down to profit for the network providers. Twitter itself is highly compatible with mobile devices. Using SMS technology you can update your Twitter page from anywhere. I’m working on a website at the moment that will also need to be updated vis mobile devices. It occurred to me that not only was 160 characters not enough, but that nearly all phones these days are web and email compatible anyway. I believe SMS technology will one day become redundant, I believe this regardless of the statistical fact that people are sending more and more texts each day. The simple fact is that a SMS message, whilst convenient is and expensive and limited way to communicate. An analogy is the BBC licence I have to pay for here in the UK. It seems to me that with more and more people using the internet to be informed and entertained, as well as the constant increases in broadband speeds it’s only a matter of time before we can get all of our television programs online. It’s a cheaper, more modern and more diverse way of communicating. This is not to say that the BBC will cease trying to charge people for the privilege.

One thing that I don’t yet understand on Twitter is why people follow me that I have never met and have no interest in. I think that people must just go though people’s lists and press the follow button without giving it a seconds thought. I guess it’s one way of promoting their own accounts. If someone follows me I do check them out and if I find what they have to offer an interest I will add them, I will not do it however just to promote my own Twitter account.