A Local Band – Artificial Flight – First Music Video

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: July 25th, 2009 | 0 Comments

A local band here in Dundalk have recently finished making their first music video. Most bands do try and make their own videos. It seems to be a must nowadays for any band big or small :D .

None the less a local band here has made their music video called: Bright White Light by Artificial Flight. This song has always been my favorite off of their album, and I was really happy to hear that they chose that song to be used for their video.

They have recently gotten there own website, I was originally supposed to build it, however one of the other band members went ahead and got it done with someone else that they knew. The site is looking really well and can be found here: http://www.artificialflight.net.

The site is what you would expect from a band, it has all their music on the actual site. I would personally not add all of the band’s music to the site; usually you would add 2 of their most popular songs. The reason for this is so that nobody can download the full album off the site for free!

Which makes having a shop to buy there cd pretty pointless. Why would you buy the cd when you can listen for free on their site! I have the cd already and know that it is worth buying and for only €5 it is definitely worth a listen :D .

Anyway here is there new music video, looks great, enjoy :) .

Why Did My Analytics Break?

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: July 22nd, 2009 | 4 Comments

On this blog I use Google analytics to track how many visits I get to the site. I also use it on all my other sites that I have made. It is by far the best tool to get statistics on a website.

For some reason though, about 15 days ago, my Google analytics stopped recording data on my visitors! I now have 11 days of stats that are just 0, I do not mind that I cannot see how much traffic I got, the thing that I am wondering is how it stopped working!

I use a plugin in wordpress to add the code to the site, it makes it simple, less likely to break the source code of the site, but it is not very likely anybody could possibly break the source code of their site by adding the Google analytics code.

So for the few days that my analytics were down, I was trying loads of different plugins to try and get them working again, but I had no luck. Then suddenly one day it started to work again.

The graph above shows the traffic to this blog for the past few days, you can see the sudden dip in the graph; this is when the Google analytics tracking stopped working! It is strange that it suddenly begun to work again.

I know that other users of Google Analytics have experienced this before and as far as I know there is no known reason why it happens. If I were to make a suggestion to what might have happened, it would be that maybe there may have been maintenance occurring at Google, however I doubt it would affect tracking for more than a day or 2. Also maybe there might have been a huge increase in traffic to Google analytics.

Should I Go, Or Should I Stay?

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: June 30th, 2009 | 1 Comments

My blog here is currently hosted on Lunarpages servers and my hosting account expires now at the beginning of next month. In order to renew my hosting account there it would cost me $107.40 (€76.53) which is a ridiculas amount to have to pay for one year’s hosting, in my opinion. I decided to have a quick look on the Lunarpages site to see what their current rate is for customers now, and it is so much better than what they are offering me!

Now you can get a full years hosting with them for only $59.40 (€42.33), that is almost half the price they are trying to get off me! So I think that it would be a good idea to leave Lunarpages, I have got another hosting account with Dreamhost which only cost me $9.24 (€6.96) for a full year, now obviously that is not their usual yearly cost, but I got that when they were having a deal.

My point is here why should I pay for another years hosting when I could just simply export all my databases from Lunarpages and then Import them all into Dreamhost then I could just transfer my Domains Nameservers over to Dreamhost. That way I could have a full years hosting with Dreamhost for virtually nothing, since I have already bought it.

I think that it would not hurt Lunarpages to look after their current customers before looking for new ones. They could offer their current customers a discount on their next year’s hosting that would at least match their current offer they are offering to new customers!

I still have not fully made my mind up yet if I should switch, but it is likely that I will.  I have a few more days to decide before my hosting expires, then I will send off the e-mail cancelling my account if I choose to go ahead. Sure my websites might go down for a few hours, but it will be worth it to save me spending another $107.40! :o