Wednesday, December 14, 2005 - Wed, 14 Dec 2005

What a last few days I spent! Lots of computer things, but nothing for Behold.

My daughter’s new computer (see Nov 6) has been crashing in Word in a strange way. It only happens when my computer is turned off, to which her default printer is attached. I’ve been trying to find the reason for that for a few weeks. Reinstalled Microsoft Office twice, reinstalled the printer updated driver, re-seated and reinstalled her wireless card and updated driver. The strange thing is that her old computer had exactly the same configuration but did not have the error. Finally, evidence on the Internet seems to indicate this is a driver problem that HP has not fixed. We got around it for now by not using my printer as her default. I may try the HP chat support and see what they say. But we did seem to make her wireless connection work better in the process, so at least that was one plus.

Her old computer is still in the shop at Best Buy. I’m documenting the many calls to them and their mishandling of this warranty repair. 4 weeks and counting! Good thing we got the replacement computer right away … but I’m not telling them that, yet.

Thinking about those half dozen or so genealogy programs that allow affiliate links, I decided to check them out and apply for each and then add them to my Genealogy Software Links page. It was interesting to see how the other affiliate programs work. I don’t expect this to make me any money, but I do now feel that Behold’s Affiliate program with Plimus will be one of the better ones.

I noticed that BroadBoard, the bulletin board system that I purchased, customized, and now use for the Behold Forum has closed up. I can understand that with the many other Bulletin Board scripts out there, many of which are free. I emailed Dan, the author, and thanked him for the time he spent developing it, and he sent back a nice response. I have considered switching to other forums, but I don’t like their common style of just showing one line for each topic. I prefer the way e-mail and newsgroups look in Outlook Express. I may finish up my development of an OE sort of interface for the forum if I get time. I started that long time ago (Sept 2 2004) but it had a few bugs and I never implemented it (gave up for on Oct 3 2004 - See my Archived Behold Blog if you are interested). I do notice that my Behold Forum does take a couple of seconds to load the main page and the message list page. That is too long and when I get a chance I should try to find the cause and make it faster.

Then I was just blown away when I saw the big competition going on in the last few months by some of the Website hosting companies. If you look at the major monthly computer magazines, you’ll see multi-page color adds by 1and1.com. That’s nothing new as they’ve been doing that for probably a year now. Up to about October, they’ve been offering 1 GB of space and 25 GB of transfer volume for their $5 a month plan. Then in November, they started comparing themselves with Yahoo’s $12 plan and Go Daddy’s $10 plan, and increased to 2 GB space and 100 GB volume to match or exceed their competition. Then in December, the others re-raised and 1&1 went to 10 GB and 500 GB transfer, still for $5 a month! I decided to check what other companies are offering, and they all seem to be raising their limits as well. I am running out of space on my site at MyHosting.com so I thought I’d look again at other hosting services (see Nov 11). My conclusion is that I’m worried that these other companies with their great offers may be too good to be true. Even though many are top-rated, they each have some bad comments, so unless I have a really important reason to switch, it may just be more prudent to stay with what I’ve got. My solution might be to open a second account with MyHosting at $10 a month with 2 GB space and 30 GB monthly transfer volume to get me out of the space crunch. Doing that will eliminate the need for me to move my entire site to a new service, and I can move things between the two sites (hopefully transparently to visitors) as it becomes required.

Now with all that out of the way, tomorrow I can get back to Behold.