Aldebaran Web Design's Blog

DreamHost had a bad day today. Please note this is the best place to check status if your website is down, and you can’t login to your control panel:

http://status.dreamhost.com/

If things are really bad, even that URL might be down, and it’s best to check Twitter.com and search for @dhstatus, you can do this here: http://search.twitter.com/

I should note that I’ve been with DreamHost since 2006, and outages like these are not a typical experience. If you have a business that can’t tolerate its website being down for several hours, you should probably not have your website hosted with a shared hosting company (and be paying way, way more than the $10/month that DreamHost charges).

For my own business and the small businesses I work with, we can tolerate some downtime occasionally, and so for us DreamHost is a great choice for inexpensive hosting. I advise my clients to first try to notify DreamHost if they have an issue, if they can’t login, check the status.dreamhost.com website to see if there is a systemic issue.

But please don’t panic. After watching the very scary news from Japan, it really puts issues like having a website being down for a few hours into perspective.

I just received a phone call from a prospective client that was so unbelievable - well, I just had to write a blog article about it. This business owner wanted a website, because they (wrongly) believed, that somehow creating their own website would remove bad reviews their business had received online. They had no understanding of how the web worked and were absolutely furious.

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I’ve had several clients ask me this, and it’s difficult to find this answer online, so I’m posting it here in my blog.

To clone a product in the ECT store:

1. Login to your store’s control panel

2. Click on Product Admin

3. Locate the product you’d like to clone.

4. Hold down the “CTRL” key (or “alt option” if you’re on a Mac) while clicking Modify.

5. Notice at the top of the page it says “You are cloning the product “Your Product Name Here”.

Use this feature to quickly make new products that are very similar to each other to save yourself time.

My clients know that I work out of a home office near Seattle WA. I used to work in a big corporate office with lots of human coworkers. Today I captured a video of one of my current coworkers, a cute male Anna’s hummingbird:

This video was captured with an iPhone 3GS. This little fellow was officially counted in the Great Backyard Bird Count going on this weekend.

One of my clients found this excellent list of “50 Blog Topics for Small Business Owners”. If you have a small business website with a blog, and are banging your head on the desk trying to think of what to write about, read over this list, it’s sure to help you think of something to write!

50 Blog Topics for Small Business Owners by Jessica Swanson.

Tom Linde LICSW, is one of my therapist clients. Recently he was interviewed by our local Seattle news regarding his thoughts about a recent tragic house fire and it’s impact on those left behind.

Tom has an excellent blog on his website where he helps readers with issues such as addiction and depression. I think Tom can be the next Dr Phil.

If you’re at all familar with Facebook, you’ll enjoy this “A Life On Facebook” video by Maxime Luere. Having recently created a Facebook account (and subsequently deleted it) I found it quite good. Enjoy!

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Here’s a good example of what WordPress spam looks like, disguised as a comment.

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Recently I had a prospective client who did appliance repair tell me that websites for small business owners are not needed, because when people need an appliance repaired, they always use their phone books. I told him I didn’t even have a phone book. He thought I was lying. Now I realize the white pages are not the yellow pages, but surely this article would have helped me win the debate: White Pages Face Last Call: Residential Phone Books’ Days Are Numbered

“Telephone companies argue that most consumers now check the Internet rather than flip through pages when they want to reach out and touch someone.”

I’d imagine the yellow pages will follow the same trend…

For a brief time this fall, I tried out Facebook. But after a few weeks, I just didn’t find it useful. Given my profession and how much time I already spend on the computer, I didn’t really need another place I had to go and monitor. So I deactivated my account. But was I surprised when my partner was able to pull up my account on her iPhone!

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