We found some of our menus missing. What's worse: they were missing on some of our client's websites. The culprit?Microsoft! Internet Explorer version 10 interprets some HTML and Javascript differently than its previous versions and for that matter differently than any other browser (what else is new?) including some code necessary to display the menu systems of some of our clients. This news would have been devastating to other web developers who code pages by hand or use older technology, but we use DotNetNuke. It didn't eliminate the problem, but it certainly minimized it.

A client whose site exhibited the symptoms of the Microsoft problem asked why DNN didn't protect her from it. I was able to sing DNN's praises to her ...

I'm presenting along with several other business today. Here are my slides.

Like a lot of small businesses, Sprocket Websites sometimes suffers from the “Shoemaker’s kids have no shoes” syndrome. We spend a great deal of time working on our customer’s websites. From building new sites, to updating existing sites with new looks or functionality, to creating and posting new content and social media updates. It keeps us busy to say the least and sometimes we go a while working in the business before we can get back to working on the business a bit. Well a new module update spawned a whole bunch of work for me on our own website.

At 11:00pm last night I was notified that one of my servers was having a problem. I run a couple of site monitoring tools and Simon was the one that picked up the problem first. I got online and started a remote desktop session to the server and it connected, which normally when one of my servers isn’t running properly a RDC will fail. However, it connected and presented me with the “I’ve just had an unexpected reboot problem screen” and wanted me to tell it what happened. Well at this point I had no idea and thought about the irony of that particular screen as I filled in “unknown” into the restart reason box.

I would like to think that I run a fairly well organized reliable configuration for my main production machine and for the last four years things have been mostly stable.  Sure I had a blow out of my video card a couple of years ago, but I wasn’t really worried about my data then.  I run a nice Mac Pro configuration that I have updated over the years.  A 240Gb SSD boot drive that makes things nice and quick.  A 1Tb main hard drive that just held my user folder and a 250Gb time machine disk that kept my important stuff backed up.  I am a Dropbox user so all of my documents are really stored in the cloud and I use IMAP email so they are stored in the cloud as well.  Yea cloud…

So there it was the dreaded spinning beach ball…

A friend of mine who's a graphic artist and does a lot of print work asked about CMYK vs RGB. 

It started when a webpage photo wouldn't show in a client's browser, but she saw it in her's. The first place to look was reference - was the graphic being referenced from her local disk so she saw it but the rest of the world would not? No, the reference was correct and the file was on the server where it should be, so she asked me what was wrong. She wanted to know if it was a DotNetNuke issue, since the site was built using DNN.