Chronicles of On The Road Travel

The Big Crash

Yes, that's right... my worst nightmare realized. Those of you who have checked the site over the past day will have noticed that it is no longer there. Where has it gone? It's as if the technology gods overheard that I was ready to launch. Just like that... gone.

As I had pictured it in my nightmares, the programmers are blaming the hosting company and the hosting company is blaming the programmers. I suspect they are both out to get me but as you know I'm not technologically sound enough to prove it.

It all started a few weeks ago when, you might remember, I had the brilliant idea of upgrading the site to a new server before launching so that we could get all of the scripts functioning. Someone says 'the virtual server is the answer to your problems', I say 'great, where to I sign up?'. From there it has slowly gone downhill. The programmers couldn't figure out what to do when they got there and so the whole upgrade cost about 4 times what it should have. But... the programmers are not entirely to blame. I am beginning to suspect that it is a job requirement at the hosting company to have a lobotomy, because it is pretty rare that after waiting 1/2 hour on hold for tech support, the person answering knows what they are talking about.

After the crash I went through about 6 different tech support people (which was an entire afternoon and probably recycled through their support staff) only to find that the 'manager of the managers' only works from 6am - 2pm. Sweet life. Although much more accommodating, the 'manager of managers' was unable to tell me exactly what had happened, but he was pretty sure that everything had been lost. Conveniently, the person who supposedly knows how the virtual servers work get on at 2pm. Super! At 2:05pm it was officially confirmed... lost. No, it was definitely not a server issue, they assured me. Even though half the people at the company don't realize that they offer virtual server packages.

So, here I am, picking up the pieces. Waiting for India to come online so that we I can cozy up to my keyboard for the night. If anyone has any hosting companies that they recommend - I welcome the suggestions. In the meantime, stay tuned... we'll be back.

Learning from My Mistakes

I knew going into this that the technology side of running a website would logically be the biggest issue I'd run into. I mean, I've been traveling most of my life, so that part is just second-nature. Navigating my way through Brazil using sign language... no problem. Pretending I'm engrossed in my book at an Argentinian restaurant because i'm a woman traveling alone.. i'm used to it. But I have never associated the word Apache with a computer, and to me a Unix environment sounds like a happy place where people get high and float around all day picking flowers and eating oatmeal-raisin cookies. This week I have run into one of the biggest headaches yet (or maybe my ability to handle it is wearing thin).

The site we designed has all kinds of fun features, some of which were not working on the cheap, shared server that I have been using to date. As you know from previous posts, the folks at my hosting company are relatively useless... ranking a close second behind my outsourced programmers. Neither party was able to tell me how to get the remaining features working. This is my baby.. of course i'm going to go to every length possible to make it perfect! I finally found out from someone that because I was on a shared server, I was unable to execute some of the scripts that had been written for the website. Of course that 'someone' worked for the hosting company and so obviously the answer to my problems was to upgrade to a virtual server. It sounded pretty cool and heh, it costs more, so it MUST be better. Since no one else had come up with a solution I figured, OK.. virtual server it is.

Several weeks later, a few days of downtime and many, many late nights - oh yeah, and $600+ to have the programmers transfer the site - I feel I have taken 1 step forward and 10 steps back. Turns out the virtual server doesn't come equipped with any of the easy to use goodies that came with the shared server. Pay more... get less. It also seems that the programmers didn't really know how to make anything work on the new server, hence the delay and cost.

The best part is, as soon as I switched to the new server, the hosting company tore down the old one (its really the only time I've seen them act quickly on anything). In retrospect I should have been suspicious when a week after ordering the upgrade I called the hosting company and one of the support staff told me the delay was because they were probably out at Best Buy getting the hardware to build out space for my new server. So much for 'virtual'.

So, you'll be happy to know that the site now accommodates the newsletter function and the emails that are set on a timer. Unfortunately, I no longer have access to our email accounts, to the web stats package, or to the FTP. Oh yeah, and it seems that anybody who tries to sign up for the site that is not on my IP address gets a fatal error. This one I found out by chance when a friend sent me an email asking if she'd been blocked from signing up because she waited so long. I double-checked from my end and had no problems. I called another delinquent friend in London who had not yet signed up either. I forced him to log on and sign up and sure enough.. fatal error.

So the fun continues and so do the delays. From one day to the next I am not sure what is progress and what is merely funny. But since the programmers are gone until Monday, I will just have to wait to find out. The moral of the story: Your children don't have to be perfect. Let them run with what they've got and you'll all be better off.

Have a good weekend!

Congrats!

A big congratulations to our friends Tony and Danny who just launched their web portal Zimbio. Zimbio is a network of public portals  on a variety of topics of interest. Users can learn everything-they-ever-wanted-to-know by searching a specific portal, or they can add content to those portals to let others know about their own insights. And... if you think you know a lot about something, you can start your own portal! Check it out now so that when Zimbio is a household name, you'll be able to say 'I saw it when...'

On an entirely unrelated note, there is an article in this month's National Geographic Traveler magazine about  the cost of knock-off goods. Apparently the Italian polizia are cracking down on those who purchase these items. The article sites a Swedish visitor who bought a pair of imitation brand-name sunglasses and was slapped with an $11,000 fine. Having experienced 2 separate (and unfortunate) run-ins with the Italian police in my lifetime, I can sympathize with the Swede, and sadly congratulate her for being able to negotiate the penalty down to $4,500 -- the cost of a one-week's stay at a mid-range villa in Tuscany!
 

My Baby Is Born...

It's finally here... last night at midnight PST, weighing in at several megabytes and taking a huge weight off my shoulders, we launched the site! Ironically, it has been about 9 months since I signed on our second set of developers after a snafu with the first one. You can officially check it out at www.ontheroadtravel.com. It has been a roller-coaster the past few weeks and on Monday I was pretty much ready to call it a day (not for the first time), but we finally have a product!

There are still a few kinks to work out with the member features, so the member invites won't go out for a little while, but we are pretty much there.

Hindsight is always 20-20, but in retrospect I would have done things a LOT differently. Once I got going on ideas, I was convinced that it all had to be done at once. Really, the content should have been up months ago. But, i guess that wouldn't have changed anything with the most recent problem I had. Ever since the site was launched on the demo server, the photos have looked awful. I kept asking the programmers and they would tell me: it will be fine once it goes up on the live server. Yeah right! We uploaded it to the server a few weeks ago and the problem actually got worse. So, of course, the programmers blamed the hosting company. After a week of getting nowhere with the hosting company (literally, nobody at the help line knows anything about technology and every query has to be sent to an email that never gets answered) I had completely lost my patience. Everyone blaming everyone else, but no one offering a solution. I even had guys at Cisco trying to upload a new graphics program for my hosting company... So, on Monday, I got fed up and took all the pictures off and figured, OK, I'll just launch the site without the photos and get that fixed (along with all the other things that the programmers screwed up) in the next round of changes. As soon as I did that, the problem was solved! Go figure.

Anyways, please take a look through it and let me know if you have any feedback, suggestions, etc.

Have fun!
Jen

PS - Peru will be the next country on the list. If anyone has been recently and has some recommendations, I'd love to hear them, just post a comment on the blog.

Site Update

I have been a bad blogger... but for a good reason - I promise. So, the site was uploaded to our server this week. We've spent the week cutting and pasting our data from our edit pages into the database. Fun stuff! So basically the week has gone like this: 7am - 10pm: cut and paste, 10pm - 1am fight with the programmers over what was done and what was supposed to be done.

Given that, I don't have much of interest to say.. except that i'm hopefully we'll have a functioning site by next week!

Have a great weekend.
 

OTR Travails

So, this is the part of my job that is less than glamorous. I am sitting here at 10:00pm waiting for my programmers (who are in India) to start their day so that we can discuss the remaining bugs in the site.

I had been warned by several people not to go the India route when I started building the site. How bad could it be? Well… let me tell you. It may be 1/5th of the price, but it will more than cost you in headaches and delays. For seven months now I have been waiting. Thank god for the back-to-back re-runs of Sex and The City that they have started airing at 10:00pm!

It’s not all bad really. When I look at what they have accomplished, I’m actually really happy with the results. But it certainly hasn’t been straightforward. About a year ago I put an add on Craig’s List looking for someone who could handle this whole technology thing… and I got a ton of response. I narrowed it down and found what I thought would be the answer to my problems. Someone who was passionate about travel and who understood that a cookie is something that is dropped onto your hard-drive and not something you crave when you are sitting up at night waiting for the sun to rise in India.

Unfortunately about 2 weeks before our scheduled launch date in June she backed out of the project after having gone through some serious personal issues. I was left with a bunch of HTML garble and a big pit in my stomach. Luckily Seth was just finishing up school at that point and had some time on his hands. He volunteered to do a full-blown search for new programmers while I was up to my ears in planning my next research trip to Guatemala. Kudos to my husband for saving the day and keeping me from throwing in the towel (as he has done many times since then).

The months that followed are a blur. This is me at our beautiful escape in Lake Atitlan, surrounded by some of the most incredible scenery in the world, geeking away on my laptop.

The days were spent researching content and writing up specs for the design of the site and the nights involved finding an internet café that was open late enough for me to get online with the programmers in India. This generally led to several hours of back and forth over what we had agreed on and why I wasn’t going to pay extra for functionality that I had already paid for.

Very long story short, we are finally finished and are now testing the site. Some nights they like to pretend I don’t exist, so I sit here online waiting and they never show up. Ahh the joys! I will be sure to let you know the minute it is up and running.