mybigadventures.com

As you may have noticed I've been pretty busy updating the site over the last couple of months. Over the past few years it has been linked to when the renewal comes around for the hosting account and I feel like I should make better use if it. This year was no exception - although thus far in terms of updates has been more productive.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the fact that I was moving over to a new hosting account as the yorkshireman in me couldn't bare to pay the ridiculous extra money for renewal. All went well, I was switched over to a new account and was told the exisiting plan was cancelled and would not renew. Imagine my suprise then, when I recieved the confirmation email through today from GoDaddy to confirm the renewal of the account and to find that the money had been taken from my paypal account. At first although annoyed I thought, it will be fine, I'll call GoDaddy explain how their representative had told me the account would not renew and get a refund. And that's what happened . . until it dawned on me that the amount I was being told would be refunded was about $60 less than the amount I had paid. When I queried this, I was told that the extra $60 had been paid in tax and "it's not our policy to refund tax". Despite the fact that I have been charged for something that I do not want, GoDaddy are unable/unwilling to offer me a full refund. I asked about their complaints procedure and was told they do not have one. I am shocked by the poor service offered by such a large company and it seems I'm not alone. As soon as I googled the issue I found lots of other people complaining about the same issue. At present I am attempting to recover the money through the paypal resolution centre, so I guess I'll have to let you know how that turns out, but for anyone else out there buyer beware!

In other news, our ongoing issue with first utility has finally been resolved thanks to the energy ombudsman. We had an issue back in September and it has taken until now to bring it to a close. Now to put it in context after months of phone calls back and forth to First Utility we resorted to the energy ombusman. In 6 short weeks they have made a final judgement in our favour and bring the whole mess to a close - happy days! So a lesson for the future when the energy companies are dragging their feet go to the ombudsman (www.ombudsman-services.org/energy.html) - it's a great free service and will see the issue is resolved much more quickly and with much less hassle.

I think that's all for now. If anyone has experienced similar issues with GoDaddy and managed to claim the tax back, let me know in the comments below.

*** UPDATE ***

I can't believe it - PayPal sorted this out on the same day that I raised the issue in their resolution centre. They reversed the transaction and I got a full refund - fantastic! So the lesson - if you're buying from GoDaddy use Paypal or a credit card and then, if for whatever reason you need a refund, go through either PayPal or the credit card company. Great job PayPal! 

So this is just a quick update to tell you all that the sign up page is now up and running so you can create an account and become a member of mybigadventures. Not everything is quite there yet so please bare with me whilst I iron out the remaining bugs. You will however be able to setup a new account, complete with profile image that you can change until you find one you're happy with. Please register using your email and choose a name (this will be displayed whenever you add a comment so keep them sensible please. 

Please feel free to go through and add a few comments to some of the photos and blogs and let us know what you like and would like to see more of. Enjoy!

Now that the photo functionality is up and running I thought it was about time I added some of our photos. For now I've added a selection from 2012, 2013 and 2014 to join the recent additions to 2015. 

Whilst I'm talking about updates, I've also been working on the member side of the website as I want to re-enable the signup page so that you can comment on photos and blogs in addition to subscribing to updates. I've also added another photo to the banner slideshow of a Canada Goose taken at Roundhay Park in Leeds.

Hopefully there should be some progress over the next week or so. Until then enjoy the new photos.

So it's a little late, but over Easter I went on a jaunt to Florence with my mum and dad, to celebrate their 65th birthdays. And we packed a lot in! Besides the usual visits to the Uffizi and the Duomo, we explored as many of the little steets and vast plazas as we could, finally venturing across the river to the beautiful Giardino di Boboli, a place Ben and I didn't get to on our previous visit.

We stayed in the NH Anglo-American hotel, set a little outside the main tourist area of Florence. Although it is a 15 minute walk into the central areas of Florence, it's an easy walk and you can either ramble through the streets, or take the path by the river. 

Dad and I also braved the heights of the Duomo cupola, climbing 400-odd steps to reach the top - but it was worth it! The views across Florence are quite breathtaking!

I'll add more details later, but for now, have a look at the rest of the photos linked below. Enjoy the rest of the bank holiday.

One site down, a few more to go! I still have the word press sites to tackle but I've got this one moved across. It went relatively smoothly with just a couple of small bumps in the road. As it's a new hosting account it also comes with the GoDaddy CPanel to set everything up. Having backed the database up, it was a fairly simple to upload the script which then happily recreated everything again. The only step I missed was assigning my new database user to the database itself so I was hitting loads of database errors for a while. GoDaddy support were pretty awesome though and had it fixed within a couple of minutes.

My final error is an odd one. I've been happily writing blogs for the last couple of months with apostrophe's in titles and blogs but when it came to trying to save this very blog, the first time around, I found that anything with an apostrophe in wouldn't save. At first I thought the JavaScript was to blame but it turned out to be a problem in the PHP. I've no idea how it worked before, but all that was required was to escape my sql string paramters e.g:

$text = "it's going to be a wonderful day";
$text = $mysqli->real_escape_string($text);

As I say, I'm not sure how or why this worked before, and not now, as the only thing that changed in the code was the MySQL connection string. I assume it must be down to a version change in PHP or MySQL on the hosting account. Either way - happy days - we're back!

Well it's almost that time of year when the hosting account comes up for renewal. As always I had a look online to see how the prices weighed up. The renewal seemed a bit steep from GoDaddy so I had a look at how much they were charging for new customers. As seems to be the case everywhere nowadays (gas, electricity, insurance) customer loyalty counts for nothing and acquiring new customers is everything, so I was not entirely suprised to find the new hosting accounts with 1/3 off. I gave them a call to see if there was anything they could do, and they offered a small discount on the renewal but not anything close to the new customer discount. After a bit of deliberation I've decided to setup a new account and set about moving everything over. I have a couple of wordpress sites to move too so fingers crossed it all goes smoothly. So this is just a quick note to say, if you see the site disappear over the next few days, don't worry its only temporary and we'll be back online soon!

I thought I'd write something here rather than through the usual social media outlets to wish my sister Lorna a happy birthday. I even managed to get a birthday card there on time this year which is something of a result! I Hope you've had a great day!

And here's the only image I have on here of you . . . which I also used some time ago . . .  

So I had a few images lined up for the header and couldn't quite decide which one should make the cut. I've given each of them a run over the past few weeks and as you can see above, I've decided to give them all a go at once. I've seen a lot of these fading image galleries around on the Internet - theyre often used to display current offers on sites like ebuyer. After a quick browse around the Internet I found what I was after at css-tricks.com/examples/SimpleSlideshow/. It was nice and easy to customise for this site and thought I'd share it a bit wider for anyone looking to do the same thing. 

You basically store the images in a div and then Jquery cycles around fading the current image out and the next one in whilst keeping unused images hidden. To set up start by adding the HTML for your images. I've included a sample below, but you can add as many image divs as you want.

<div id="slideshow">
   <div>
       <img src="image1.jpg"/>
   </div>
   <div>
       <img src="image2.jpg"/>
   </div>
</div>

Then you just need a bit of CSS to style it

<style>
   #slideshow > div {
       position: absolute;
   }
</style>

Finally you just add the jquery code to add the animation. You'll need to include the JQuery library - you can include locally or from ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.5.2/jquery.min.js. Then add the following code to the page:

$(document).ready(function() {
    $("#slideshow &gt; div:gt(0)").hide();
    setInterval(function() {
        $('#slideshow &gt; div:first')
            .fadeOut(1000)
            .next()
            .fadeIn(1000)
            .end()
            .appendTo('#slideshow');
     }, 10000);
});

I haven't decided if I love it yet. I think I might tweak the timing a bit more to reduce the frequency of changes. In other news it's nearly half term!

I eventually got the image upload working again (to a fashion) and to celebrate I've started to create some new albums - beginning with New York from Easter this year. I went with my mum as an early 60th birthday present and we had a great time. The weather stayed fine whilst we were there and we managed to get around a lot of the sights on our short break.

There's still some work to do on the image upload front as I want to enable client side resizing of images. Basically the images I take are pretty big file sizes and would take ages to upload not to mention the load on the server for loading and resizing dynamically. I know that you can resize using HTML5 and the canvas element but need to figure out how to fit into my current JQuery setup.

For now - enjoy the photos - more to follow.

Sadly development has come to a bit of a stand still as coursework deadlines and exam time has arrived. After a few long evenings the first GCSE coursework marks and sample have been sent and by the end of this week so will the rest. Having not logged in for quite a while I just logged on to my google analytics account to have a look if anyone else out there had stumbled across mybigadventures. I was some what suprised to find that quite a lot more visitors have joined us from all over the world - so welcome one and all. 

For all those of you that have not come across it before, I highly recommend google analytics for getting a picture of how your visitors are interacting with your site, it makes some interesting reading and can give some ideas of where you could improve. You can also sign up for a google webmaster account which gives you some tips with getting your site indexed on google. Both great tools and pretty straight forward to set up. I've added the links so please click through to find out more - but when you're done remember to come back and have a look at some of the archives.

For all visitors new and old, I recommend looking at the achives from 2007 April-July when Dani and I took our trip around Europe (It was the reason this site was first created and still remains the bulk of the content, although hopefully that will change).

That's all for now folks. Enjoy!