Dreams of a full team and something working on it's own

I know, I know.. pipe dreams right? On the day that I am pretty much alone (only developer here) the wheels fall off.

Starts off with an error Morjana let me know about. Something had expired a day early, and there was no default "whoops" image for the homepage, so it just picked the first one in the list, which happened to be miller's crossing. Arghhhhh...

Next was an email from our host, cheerily informing me that the cname had been setup for stargate. I use dnsstuff.com to check and find it's not there. Umm.. of course.. they wouldn't understand this sentence:

What I need is Stargate.mgm.com (not with the www, I’ll redirect them over to just Stargate.mgm.com) to have a CNAME pointing to mgmstudios.vo.llnwd.net.

They setup the cname on www.stargate.mgm.com. Arghhh... now it's showing a blank page, and some of the marketing material for stargate has that misbegotten url on it.
I call them, they promise to fix right away.. I check a couple minutes later and there is no longer a cname on the www, it's on the other one. JOY.

Two hours later I decide I should just check and make sure www.stargate.mgm.com is going to the other site (stargate.mgm.com). Nothing.. no resolve.. um. I check.. they deleted the entire zone file!! This means there is no site there at all! I storm into my boss's office and rant and rave for a while, pulling on my hair. I'd done a couple sites already this week, sites that get next to zero traffic. One of the large sites comes up for moving, and voila.. they can't understand the most simple of instructions. I call again.. please fix. Right now, 4 hours later, I still can't get to www.stargate.mgm.com, but friends in other parts of the country seem to see it ok. If anyone happens to notice it not working, please let me know, and I'll call the host in a screaming fit.

We're luckily planning to change over to manage our own DNS in the future. Although this means even more work and responsibility for me, it means that I won't have to deal with this crap. They are SLOW.. omg so slow.. and they get it wrong about 30% of the time.

Now to top it off. I get emailed a link for the "game" that's on the stargate site on Friday's. Today I get the email, do my usual code updates to put it on the live servers, and push it live. It's not there. I check the servers over and over.. but to no avail. It just won't load. If I browse to http://stargate.mgm.com/games/ it works fine, if I go to http://stargate.mgm.com/games/index.html it shows last week's game. I have tried to "expire" the page with meta tags, I've tried to change the link to it in the nav, but it won't pick up the new javascript file. This CDN stuff is great.. until you can't make it work!! Akamai was pretty easy, you just login to their interface, and specify the file you want to renew, and it does it within 10 minutes. I've poured over the Limelight interface and can't find anything like it. We have a short 8 page document from them which explains nothing.



It's 5.30pm, and I am staring at the door. I know there are 4 beers in my fridge (Coopers!!) that are calling my name. It's been an alright week.. well up until today!

I'm excited that SciFi channel ordered 13 eps of Sanctuary! Thanks to Morjana for the heads up there.. I think they sent out the press release earlier than we were expecting though. There may be changes to the Stargate site in the new future.

All these great fanfic recommendations have been running my printer dry! (Happily!)

Have a great weekend!

BFN