I’ve written only recently about various examples of poor service from companies. Unfortunately, I’d like to add two more.

I recently ordered a USB hub from eBuyer. Except that an SD memory card turned up instead. I contacted eBuyer by phone and they said that they’d email me return instructions straight away and despatch the hub once they’ve received the card back. Let me get this straight… despatch the item that I ordered (and was expecting to receive today) once I’d sent back the item they sent to me by mistake. Their cock-up.

And I’ve not, a number of hours later, received an email, so I’ve sent them one of their “enotes”. I’ll see what happens. Especially now that I know the SD card is worth twice the cost of the USB hub.

Update (08/01/2008):

eBuyer got back to me. They wanted me to send the unwanted product back, upon receipt they’d send me the correct one. So I told them this wasn’t good enough. They told me to ring their Support Number <sigh>

After get through a queue of 19 people, I got the answer I was looking for… they’d arrange pickup of the memory card tomorrow and delivery the missing USB hub. Hoorah.

Although this only came after a protracted argument when they couldn’t find my work address on their system. “Well you sent it to me at that address in the first place” was my argument. It worked.

Update (10/01/2008):

They picked up the memory card yesterday from my work address but my USB hub never turned up. Ringing them again, I noticed the problem whilst waiting in their phone queue – they’d despatched it to my home address. By courier. And no-one is there.

They asked me too which address to use, but then only applied it to the pick-up. Idiots.

They’ve now changed that and say I should get the hub tomorrow on Monday, depending on how long it takes Shitty Link to realise the details have changed.

Update (16/01/2008):

eBuyer finally got the hub delivered to me the next day. Hurrah!

I’ve finally decided that I’m winding up Artiss Web Design. I’ve not had the chance to do it properly, so will be converting all links to point to this site.

Additionally, I’m transferring all the back-end databases to here as well (which has a quicker server). Copy+ has already been converted in this way. However, if you come across any problems with any of these sites (or bmtg.org.uk) then please let me know.

Maybe one day I’ll even get the chance to finish pulpsf.com. But, then again…

LopeEdit Lite

Download from… http://www.lopesoft.com

Download size… 3.2MB
Installation size… 4.6MB

LopeEdit is a nice looking editor. It displays line numbers, word wrap indicators and, importantly, wraps correctly (i.e. re-wrapping as the windows resizes, rather than to a fixed screen position).

I tried the free version (as that’s the grand total of how much I wish to pay) but there is a “pay for” version with extra facilities. In this case, however, none of these extras were ones that I was looking for (ftp updates, file comparison, etc., are all available separately and probably a lot more powerful too).

But, as with most editors there are a couple of cons. First of all there’s no facility to launch the current page in a browser (as I’ve said before I’m surprised this isn’t missing from more editors as most are trying to be generic coding editors rather than web-specific). Secondly, this falls into a trap that others do when it comes to syntax highlighting – PHP scripts are assumed to be pure PHP. That means any HTML within them are not displayed correctly (and in the case of LopeEdit, it often gets confused). As most of my pages are HTML with a smattering of PHP within them, this means they highlight badly. Other editors assume both, others have seperate options (i.e. PHP or HTML/PHP).

Summary of LopeEdit Lite

Decent rounded code editor, not web specific, which is where its weaknesses lie.

Reviewed by David Artiss on 4th January 2008.