Big Trousers online ticketing and support introduced today.

It is designed for all customers who register  to report problems with content management, wordpress, computer hardware and software, email, photography and general IT.  Also available are articles in the knowledge base designed to assist your and your business.

The web is no longer prohibited by desktop and laptop computers. With exponentially growing numbers users surfing the web with handheld devices we’ve ensured that our support site is optimised whether you’re viewing it on your 27″ iMac or your iPhone 4.  Also, the support site is hosted away from  our main server so that in the event of server malfunction or maintenance, the support site will still be live and operational. Server maintenance or server downtime is reported by as as it occurs live in the support site.

Tickets are only visible to the registered user and Big Trousers admin. Once a ticket has been resolved however we can convert it’s contents into a knowledgebase item. As a result, questions that are answered and published become available by search in the knowledgebase. From time to time we will also publish tips and tricks in the knowledgebase.

We hope this will be a value to you, our customers.

Click here to register.

A CDN is a high performance cache that stores static assets like media, CSS files and javascript in various locations throughout the world in order to provide low latency access to them by readers in those regions.

Benefits

• At least 10x improvement in overall site performance (Significant Google Page Speed improvements) when fully configured
• Improve conversion rates and “site performance” which affect your site’s rank on Google.com
• “Instant” second page views (browser caching after first page view)
• Optimized progressive render (pages start rendering immediately)
• Reduced page load time: increased visitor time on site (visitors view more pages)
• Improved web server performance (sustain high traffic periods)
• Up to 80% bandwidth savings via minify and HTTP compression of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and feeds

Whilst we have hit some bumps along the way we have done enough trials to get a number of sites fully optimised for this purpose. Some existing sites require a fair degree of coaxing on the Amazon server with various permissions errors, and some plugin data (wp e-commerce installations prior to vers 3.8) has been difficult to manage, we feel that it is now time to deploy CDN functionality for our clients.

We are in the process of finishing a site with wp-e commerce plugin version 3.8 with positive results and in time we will have a test of a full site with and without CDN so as to provide a direct test example. In the meantime take a look at Treelogic.com.au. There site is a good example of one that does require speed of delivery. They post images, stories, pdf fact sheets and video as solid content that drives traffic and promotes use of their online store. The examples below show page design and source code showing links to the cdn.

If you have been experiencing slow load times for your site contact Big Trousers to deploy a CDN. If we already host you site it should be fairly straight forward. If not then perhaps we should.

Whilst there are numerous ways around this problem including forwarding, aliasing, and other solutions, none are perfect or platform agnostic and some feel like a bit of a hack. You could spend a hefty sum on an Exchange server and incur ongoing support fees even but for most small business this is a thing of the past.

Enter Google and their growing suite of Cloud based solutions.

Big Trousers has recently started an association with Google as a Google Apps reseller and as such can provide solutions like domain based IMAP email for your business. Whilst IMAP appears similar to POP3 in some ways it requires substantial server resource and storage. A Google Apps IMAP account gives you 25 GB data storage and state of the art spam protection and security. All this and your email address need not change from you@yourdomain.com. This service is what a Gmail account does but with your domain and email address.

Email is synchronised automatically on any device set up with the account. That is as mail is deleted on a laptop it is automatically deleted from a desktop regardless of whether one is using Outlook,  iPhone Mail app or whatever. Sent mail remain in sync regardless of which device sent the email. Contacts are synced also. There is also a webmail interface that is available for when you have to use some other device via a browser and still in sync.

Accounts cost US$50 per year. If you host your domain with Big Trousers currently then there is no set up fee for the account. A fee to set up imap server ports and ssl on various devices may be required however if you are not comfortable doing this yourself. We can provide a help document for various devices however at no cost.

The job is a display of news and coming events on 3 big screens for The West Footscray Neighborhood House. The screens run separate keynote presentations containing HD video and slideshows all with audio in 3 different locations within the center complex. Three Mac mini’s run the program files in full HD resolution and they could not be more happy with the quality of the presentations.

There were a number of hurdles to overcome however and in the interests of others trying to achieve the same result we will list solutions to some of the problems we encountered.

Firstly because there are no keyboards or mice we needed control over the screens from another Mac on the network. A 22.5 inch iMac in the locked admin office could be used via screen sharing in house but we also wanted remote access. Once all the right bits of network apparatus were in place we could gain control over the 3 Mac mini’s using Back to My Mac over the internet from our office. We can transfer updated Keynote files, check the system for failures or launch an application. With high end bandwidth at both ends it runs perfectly. On reboot however the Bluetooth equipped Mac mini’s went looking for a keyboard and mouse. Not a very pleasant screen image to greet me on the first morning of trials. This was sorted by turning off all Bluetooth services. Open system prefs/Bluetooth and advanced. Uncheck “Open Bluetooth Assistant…” box and the system will stop trying on reboot to connect.

Now to get a file to run on reboot simply add it as a login item. Normally you would have an Application as a login item, like Mail or the persistent Skype… To make a file like a Keynote slide show a login item use the login items window in System Prefs/Accounts and select and add using the + or for big files we found it was necessary to drag and drop the file into the login window.

Finally the big hurdle, getting Keynote to close to allow automated shutdown. The screens need to shutdown overnight and reboot in the morning. This keeps the noise down overnight for the neighbors. A simple task made complicated by some new code requirement that Keynote check first if a file has been saved before allowing shutdown to proceed. A good idea for those editing presentations but a pain in the butt for our purposes.

The trick was to use Automator and create an iCal alarm that simply put shuts down Keynote without saving 5 min or so prior to the scheduled Mac Mini’s shut down. Open Automater, choose iCal Alarm, select quit application from the menu and drag it into the script window. Choose Keynote from the dropdown ( here you will need to say “other” and get Keynote from within the iWork folder), UNCHECK “Ask to save changes”, then save entering Keynote Shutdown as the iCal alarm name. iCal will open with editable parameters for the alarm in a new iCal Calendar called “Automator”. Set the repeat to every day, end never, and the timing of the event and click done.

If anyone has any other questions relating to the placement setup for function of a presentation kiosk using the Mac, drop us a line and we hope we can be of assistance. Our thanks also to Rod Langham Electrical for his great work with the physical installation and heavy lifting.

This is a word of warning to all those who attempt the ‘something for nothing’ route and again a warning to those using a bit torrent client.

My advice is to pay WooThemes for their fine WordPress Themes. The other advantage of owning a license to your Premium theme is that it comes with a lifelong upgrade so that new improved code and bug fixes are downloadable in order to improve your site functionality. Some Themes are available from Woo for free in any event but if you are reading this to find a solution this is it.

It is Spam at least or a Trojan waiting if you click on the link.
A big tip, if you are on a Mac and do not have Windows installed then an update to a Windows application is sure to be a hoax. Also Professional Software updates for Adobe products come via the Adobe updater software and not via email. This one looks like a third party vendor trying to get you to download their version of a pdf reader.

Delete as Spam

As of Monday 24 August we are lowering the price of the Student Subscription edition. For annual subscribers, the subscription will drop from $49 per month to $29 per month. And for students who subscribe on a month to month basis, the price will drop from $69 to $49.

With now up to a further 40% off Creative Suite Design Premium Student Subscription edition, it’s a great time to get students hooked into Adobe products, especially if they have been, um, borrowing a mate’s copy!

This is good news given the apparent lack of support for CS3 for its use under Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.
An upgrade to CS4 is now more affordable under this student subscription model.

To do this you need to email your datafile to MYOB and sign a form with payment details included.

To avoid this procedure we recommend purchasing an upgrade to your software directly from MYOB.

Big Trousers will no longer sell MYOB software for installation on the Mac Platform as we consider this licensing model to be draconian and not one we would recommend being locked in to.

As rival software is available we will look into those alternatives.

Quickbooks has been around for a while and that may be an alternative.

Connected Precision Accounting Software may not be suitable for everyone but worth a look too.

We will continue to look for other, more Mac friendly accounting software packages and report back as they are tested.

UPDATE:

Perhaps there is a version of MoneyWorks that will prove useful and competitive?

When all the bugs are ironed out we hope that an improvement to services will be evident but the change over has not gone as smoothly as we had hoped.

Keep an eye on this page for up to date details.

UPDATE:

It looks as though there is a DNS problem inherit in our issues here as well. The new server needs time to be seen by various ISP’s for it’s new location. Some domains are working fine and others are slower to propagate. This will resolve itself over the next few hours.

If we look at the sites hosted over different connection they are starting to appear and the good news is that the sites load a lot faster.

UPDATE 2:

It also seems that when the server was down for repair your ISP cached DNS failures. For those wishing to access mail in the interim you can see your site via anonymouse.org and use the webmail service attached to your hosting service by adding /webmail to your domain url.

UPDATE 3:

All should be getting back to normal now and the new server is a much better unit.
Twice the ram, dual SATA raided drives, faster dual multi threaded CPU – should be a noticeable difference in performance.
Still waiting on upload permissions to be sorted.