2012 – Off with a Bang! … and a new belief in the existence of Customer Service.

So here we are again, a new year, a new web host and a new set of challenges.

The Bang?

Over the break we were playing some heavy rounds of Wii oriented games when the console suddenly give up the ghost and stopped reading from the DVD drive. This doesn’t look like an isolated problem as there are plenty of posts relating to this sort of problem on the Internet. I have sourced a replacement drive, ordered a new custom Wii shell and hope to have it all back up, refurbished and running before long. As always, if you can source the right components and have a little technical experience it is almost always cheaper to repair than to purchase from new.

The Customer Service?

I mentioned the new Web Host. At the start of 2011 I changed to a cheaper host but, as always, expected to review this decision throughout 2011. I wasn’t really comfortable with the service and over the year the company suffered from some high negative publicity, so I looked at the market again and decided to move in late November 2011.

My new host is Kualo.com, and I have been completely taken aback by their “approachability”. Before the move I made sure that my WordPress installation was up to date and performed a database and WordPress files backup.

Kualo support offered to take these and restore the site to my new hosting area, the whole thing took less than 1/2 hour and everything was working perfectly with their help. They kept in contact, explained what they were going to do and then let me know once the work was completed.

Polite, efficient and competent. What more could you ask for?

As always, I will monitor the service throughout 2012, but for now I am really pleased with decision to move.

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New “Honorable Mentions” section of the Gamer page

I have added a new section to the Gamers page called “Honorable Mentions”. In this section I list games that I have classed as my favourites and others that fired my love of computer games, the “Classics”.

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YouTube – The World’s Largest Video Sharing Community.

Until very recently I had lumped “YouTube” in with all the other mass capturing sites on the Internet. People flocked to it because they knew of people who had been there or didn’t want to feel like they were missing out on something.

Then one day I got stuck trying to figure something out and someone suggested “Have you taken a look on YouTube“. I rolled my eyes skyward, but then went anyway to see what I could find.

That was the visit that changed everything for me and, while I still belly-ache that there is a huge amount of rubbish posted on YouTube, it has become a central resource for technical help and general information gathering.

Try it out by visiting the main YouTube link here.

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Welcome to Themetopia

I changed my hosting company recently and everything ended up broken. I am reconstructing the site and hope to have it operational again before much longer. It still has some rough edges, but I’m working on it.

The story so far, …..

Rather than continuing with my old practice of coding the site using an html editor, and all the complexity entailed therein, I decided to take a different route in this site’s reconstruction. In previous incarnations of the Themetopia.net site I use something like Dreamweaver or later, RapidWeaver – both of which are fine editors, but I wanted to become platform and computer-based editor independent. What I mean by this is that in producing my previous sites I would first need to make sure that my chosen editor was installed, the required plugins had been included and everything had to match the previous patch levels and versions used before.

And of course this all relied on a single installation on a set machine which had to be to hand (for me to make site changes) as well as Internet enabled and with a functining FTP connection to my hosting service.

What a complete drag!

Continue reading

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