Today we have launched a new web site - statuspages.co.uk. This is a development of an internal site that was built in a hurry after the Paddington exchange flood in March 2010 and is our first all new site launch since exbpa.com was created in December 2009 - all others have been existing content spun out to their own sites.
At the moment it is simply a list of links to the status pages for most of the biggest ISPs in the UK, along with BT, and some other internet based services. Not all ISPs have status pages, so where they cannot be found they are not included.
If you are supporting clients on multiple ISPs then this page could be useful, as it is a single location for the list, which we intend to keep up to date.
The site may be developed over time, but we believe it will be a useful resource in its current format.
Related Links
Statuspages.co.uk home page: http://statuspages.co.uk
ISP Status Pages: http://statuspages.co.uk/isp.asp
Phone Services Status pages: http://statuspages.co.uk/phone.asp
Other Internet Services Status pages: http://statuspages.co.uk/others.asp
Its all change here on blog.sembee.co.uk and I have an apology to make to visitors.
First the change. If you aren't reading this on the RSS feed, then you will have noticed things look a little bit different. This is because I have changed the blog engine that I am using.
Since I started blogging in 2007 I have used Community Server, nursed back to life after two server failures, plus version upgrades. However with the change of my underlying OS to Windows 2008 R2, I decided it was time to switch to something a little more basic. I only used the blogging functionality of Community Server, nothing else. Plus I wanted to drop the SQL database dependency.
Therefore I have switched to BlogEngine.net. The change was relatively painless, I was running with it on a private URL in less than 30 minutes. What took the time was putting redirect files in to place so that URLs were redirected to the new format. That is now complete (I hope).
You might find that the theme changes, I am still looking for one that I am 100% happy with, and may end up creating my own, or getting one created for me to match the other sites that I have through Sembee Ltd. I haven't quite decided. The content will stay the same.
The HTML code is a bit odd in places, which I will correct as I find the postings, but that is a display issue, nothing more.
Comments are still turned off, because I have seen then turn in to support forums before, and blogs are a really bad way for that kind of thing - use a forum instead.
Now for the apology.
If you sent a message through the Contact option in the previous Community Server based blog format, then I didn't receive it. I had thought I had disabled all of the options for contact via the blog itself, preferring to receive direct email messages. However when I started to pull the original installation of Community Server apart, I found 70 pages of contact attempts in a location I had never looked at before - called "Feedback". Most of it was spam, and was deleted, but there were still seven pages of legitimate messages, dating back to 2008. I hadn't seen of them.
Big oops.
I am not going to reply to the lost messages now, as they will be very old and no longer relevant. However if you sent me a message via the blog and did not get a reply, it wasn't intentional. They simply went in to a location I didn't know was there.
For some time, I have had a web site called <removed>, which was created a few years ago when I first discovered Google Custom Search. It was a result of playing with this new (at the time) service from Google and creating search engines for some IT vendor knowledgebase.
The site was rather basic and I didn't do anything with it.
The site wasn't published, but Google found it, and it has had a trickle of traffic ever since - usually much less than 100 visitors a day.
However at the end of last year I started to split off some of the content from amset.info out to their own sites. This was content that wasn't core Exchange or Outlook related, but was responsible for a significant proportion of the traffic. A page I wrote six years ago as a getting started guide to the Command Prompt received more visits a day than the next five pages put together. It now has its own site at http://dosprompt.info/
With these additional sites, I implemented a common core design across them all. This design needed to be applied to others, and it was then I realised how poor it was and that the site needed some attention.
At around the same time, I was starting to play around with Windows 7 in some more depth, including the accelerators that are built in to Internet Explorer 8. The Google search tool was very useful, but there wasn't one for the UK version of Google. I found one for Canada, so I pulled it apart and modified it for the UK.
I therefore wondered if I could combine this newfound knowledge of IE search Accelerators with my <removed> site. The reason for this was that I had created a custom search that was simply a web search engine, so that I could search Google without getting results that were mangled with their tracking information when you copied the result. An example of the URL that is returned is this:
<removed>
The custom search is here: <removed>
I found that you could indeed create an IE search accelerator for a Google custom search engine. What this means is that I can take a term and search for it through my own version of Google.
I have written exactly how here:
http://www.amset.info/ie/custom-search-accelerator.asp
And the resulting accelerators are to be found here:
<removed>
This post has been modified to remove links that are no longer valid.
I am pleased to announce that the domain exbpa.com has been saved for the Exchange community.
This was a domain that Microsoft first used a few years ago to point to their (at the time) recently released Exchange Best Practises Analyser. There are thousands of links to this domain across the internet as well as in books and magazines.
However Microsoft recently decided to allow the domain to lapse and early this morning it was finally deleted.
Fortunately I was able to register it myself through my consultancy company Sembee Ltd and therefore kept it out of the hands of a domain squatter.
I have uploaded a slightly modified version of the list of Exchange resources that I maintain at Daniel Petri's forum, which as well as the links to the Exchange Best Practises Analyzer, also contains links to other Microsoft tools, blogs etc.
http://exbpa.com/
While it is not the best designed web site in the world, it does the job. Hopefully the Exchange community will find it of some use.
As you may be aware, my consultancy company is Amset IT Solutions Ltd. If you hire me, then this who you pay your bills to. As from 1st April 2009, that company name is no more. I changed it to Sembee Ltd.
There are a number of reasons why I changed it, the main one being to more closely link the company to me in an attempt to increase business. I also wanted a shorter more general name for business purposes.
It will take some time for the change to be reflected in everything I do, for example the branding on amset.info is still amset, but sembee.info points to the same place.
That was also the reason why the blog URL changed to blog.sembee.co.uk, as I wanted to use www.sembee.co.uk for the company address.
Otherwise everything else remains the same.
