Now that I’ve finally moved “home” away from Streamline and to Memset, I can talk about my experience.

And I would say that Streamline are the shoddiest bunch of merchants I’ve come across. My site crawled, especially when using MySQL, and they denied there were any issues.

Recently my site was down for 4 days – across a weekend, unfortunately, when they appear to do nothing. I asked repeatedly for details of what had caused the problems but they ignored my requests. I also highlighted my site speed issues but they said it wasn’t them, but my website code.

Somehow they have an uptime guarantee. I didn’t try and claim against it because most of my problems were speed related rather than being out-and-out down. Besides, a lot of the down-time didn’t appear on their Service Status so I suspect they’ll say that doesn’t count.

But they say you get what you pay for. Streamline is half the cost of Memset. But you don’t get half the quality. Not even a tenth. If you’re considering Streamline ¹ because they’re cheap… save up and go elsewhere.

1. and, no, I won’t link to them – I don’t even want to give them the oxygen of publicity [↩]

Finally, I’m transferring hosts.

Memset have already set up my new hosting, but I just need to transfer the domain name over.

Once that’s done I’ll be setting up this blog again. And, yes, I do mean set it up, not copy it. I’ll be re-installing from scratch¹ but then putting in my theme, re-adding my plugins and, then, copying over the relevant databases.

What also this means, of course, is that this site is going to “go down” for a period of time. How long depends on when the transfer occurs and how long it takes me to restore and test this site.

Fingers crossed it will come back quicker² and better than ever.

In the meantime I’ll be maintaining blogging silence and comments are currently turned off.

See you on the other side.

1. due to “security restrictions” with the current host various configuration changes can’t be made and I suspect my WordPress installation has suffered as a result [↩]
2. btw, has anybody noticed the site is already quicker? I’ve transferred the Copy+ databases already over to the new host and I think that’s helped things a little [↩]

You’d think I enjoyed dabbling with my WordPress theme and plugins wouldn’t you

Ok, yes, of course I do. It’s great fun.

The smiley above is one such change, as I updated my “smiley pack”. I’ve also introduced the calendar which you can see at the beginning of each post. The way to do this is relatively easy (assuming you know your CSS and a bit of PHP). At first I had an iPhone style background for it, but after a scourer of the ‘net, I came across this more suitable dark version. Very nice, and I chose a text colour to match (it was white before and looked obviously stuck over the top).

The menu at the top has recently changed, to include some popular categories, and the sidebar had a refresh a while ago.

And, thanks to Tony, I’ve now added footnotes¹.

Finally, I’ve settled into Twitter and am now happy to say what plugin I’m using for that! I kept swapping at first as I tried various Twitter plugins, all of which didn’t work quite how I wanted. I wanted two pieces of functionality – to be able to inform Twitter of a post and to be able to display my latest Twitter – and thought I’d have to have two plugins. In the end, though, I cam across Twitter Tools which does both and has all the functionality that I wanted. Perfect.

Not WordPress related, but whilst on the subject of Twitter, I also experimented with Firefox plugins – TwitterFox ended up the best of that bunch (I wanted a simple way to post Twitters from my browser, and one that didn’t fowl up through my works proxy and firewall).

However, as much as I’ve plugged into my blog, I’ve also taken out – there were quite a few functions that I simply wasn’t using. It’s also keeping this installation as lean as possible – thanks to the shoddy speed of my hosting I need all I can get. As soon as I can scrape some money together I’m off to Memset (yes, yes, I keep promising that I know).

1. and this is an example [↩]

After whinging in the ear of my host, Streamline.net (poor quality but, erm, cheap), they have moved my MySQL database to a different server – a better one, they say.

Well, they didn’t have to, so I have to thank them for that. Both this blog and the Copy+ site has been updated appropriately – time will tell if it will help.

Longer term it’s still my intention to move to Memset.

As a non-profit and charity, I’m often on the look out for tools and services that I can use for the BMTG website. However, apart from various sites offering to create free websites, there seems little in the way of help for such groups. However, there are two sites/companies that I’d like to recommend…

Memset
They host the BMTG website for free. All you pay for is your domain name, which you can buy elsewhere and point to their nameservers. Their service is excellent as if the quality of their hosting. Oh, and they’re carbon neutral

PayPal
They provide reduced charges to non-profits. Google Checkout doesn’t. Never-the-less the PayPal non-profit charges aren’t much more generous than the standard Google Checkout rate.

There is also Google for Non-profits, a collection of Google tools and sites. Unfortunately, it’s just that. And the link no longer appears to work, even though it was only launched a couple of months ago.

Google Grants offers 3 months of free advertising to, well, people them deem to be appropriate – submit your details and cross your fingers.

If you’re aware of any useful services for non-profits/charities, please let me know.