Adam Jimenez | UK Web Developer

Synchronising Facebook, Twitter and Google Buzz

Social networks are great; they allow you to show everyone who cares what you're doing and thinking.

But what social network do you choose? Facebook and Twitter are very popular and Google Buzz is new - and built right into GMail.

For me it's important to keep in contact with as many people as possible, whichever social network they are on. So I'm signed up to all three.

I only have a limited amount of free time so I've needed a way to synchronise my status updates with all three. I tried some software like tweetdeck and some others - but they all felt a bit over-complicated and had horrible UIs. Plus I'd prefer not to have to install an app just to make a status update.

Facebook and Google don't exactly see eye-to-eye. There doesn't appear to be a way to hook them up together.The answer to this problem comes from the most open network of them all. Yep the answer is twitter.

With Twitter you can daisy-chain your networks together. Google Buzz allows you to connect your account to your twitter account. There is a facebook twitter app that pulls in your tweets.

So now anything I post on twitter will appear in Facebook and Google Buzz. But it doesn't have to stop there. Because twitter is so open you don't even have to use twitter directly. You can use other programs that post tweets such as Boxee. And you can use the twitter apis to make your own software post tweets.

16/04/2010 permalink | Posted in general | 2 Comments »

Plesk 9.2.1 Migration Problems

I think it was around Plesk 8.3 where everything in Plesk worked just about perfect. Since then Plesk 9 came out. I rushed to upgrade to Plesk 9 as soon as it was available. It had no discernible benefits and broke a lot of things like:

stopping email from working
automatically suspending domains when they went over quota
new interface where it's almost impossible to find anything
missing icons in said crappy interface

I managed to sort most of these out but if this wasn't enough in version 9 they had omitted the Plesk migration manager. Now this is pretty fundamental for transferring sites to different servers. You can supposedly do this with the backup/ restore program but it's a lot more complicated and buggy in my experience.

So anyway 5 months later we have Plesk 9.2.1 which has migration manager.

I migrated close to 100 domains. The migration was absolute hell and took the best part of 12 hours. Here's what I've learned about migration manager in Plesk 9.2.1:

Plesk Migration Manager won't anticipate lack of resources like domain limit/ disk space. So make sure you have plenty of both before you start.
when initiating a migration "host inaccessible" can also mean login incorrect
IP's must be set to shared to be picked up by the migration manager.
if an IP is in use, Plesk won't let you change it to shared. altho you can over-ride this in the MySQL table called ip_pool.
spam white-lists and black-lists are not migrated.
mysql stored procedures are not migrated.
after migration many sites were defaulting to the default plesk page. I had to stop/start them to get them to work.
when stopping/starting close to 100 domains at once Plesk freezes up and can take literally hours to recover.
one site in particular wouldn't migrate. it kept coming up with migration failed. i tried 5 times with different settings. Maybe because it was .tv - there isn't anything else perculiar about that domain. I finally managed to transfer it using the backup / restore facility..
Some folders were created with incorrect permissions. This is easy to fix - but I'm not sure why that should happen.

Everything seems to be working ok now. I think I will wait a while and monitor the plesk forums before I upgrade to the next version of Plesk.

13/05/2009 permalink | Posted in general | 3 Comments »

AdamJimenez.com launch

Welcome to my new bloggy / profile type site. I'm a freelance developer who has been developing websites for around 12 years.

The purpose of this site is to act as a hub for my social networks. And to blog about life as a web developer as I dabble with code and develop websites.

30/04/2009 permalink | Posted in general | 0 Comments »