i have made no secret that i have been having hosting issue with my current provider. the latency and response of my sites was unacceptable for an extended period of time and it seemed that there was nothing (mt) could do to fix the sitution. i even opened another account with slicehost to try to migrate over to their service; which is very cool but requires an in depth knowledge of the command line to function properly.

this past week all things came to a head. i was trying to check my sites on wednesday when i discovered all of them were down. i figured this was now the time to move out of my current hosting situation into something that provided more reliability. well, michael handa and his team at (mt) spent the better part of the next two days to insure they did not lose me as a customer. they transferred my files to another cluster and did extensive testing to make sure all the sites were working properly, keeping me in the loop through phone calls and emails.

ultimately, the sites came back on line and were as fast and responsive as i would expect. all my files, except for some logs, were retained. michael called me again last night to insure everything went smoothly and i was happy with the service. the efforts they undertook certainly saved me as their customer and i told him that as publicly as i complained about the issues i faced as a customer, i would be equally vocal about my satisfaction with their efforts and soluton. media temple pulled out the stops to fix the problems and get me back online – thanks to the media temple team and michael handa.

for a number of years i was an ad exec with a local shop developing their interactive team with a bunch of great guys. overall, however, the focus was not on interactive media and the world of the internets so in august of 2008 i bif adieu to the gang and hung my own shingle under a new moniker – designoMatt.

with that being the main focus of what has become the commercial endeavors of a warped entrepreneurial mind, maka’s surf shop will kind of transition to a playground of sorts. expanding on the old techniques and tutorials that were very popular (and being rebuilt for the new look) to include more writing, musings and techniques to educate and inform those that visit here.

you can follow me, as always, at twitter as well as designomatt’s tweets to see what projects are keeping me up late and getting me up early.

With the release of The Simpsons Movie just around the corner, there have been all kinds of promotions thrown at us over the past weeks. From rebranding 7-11s around the country to QuickEMarts to a couple of websites, their is no lack of market awareness. One of the problems with so much promotional material has been some of the lack of QA in the production pipeline.

The Simpsons Movie site is a great bit of entertainment, although there are far too many “Coming Soon” placeholders for my taste. A web site is constantly evolving and adding tags like that just showcase the lack of planning and foresight by the marketing execs involved with this production. I can accept that, however, because the items they have on the site are engaging and work. That cannot be said for one of the more recent additions to Springfield.

There is another Simpsons site that allows you to upload a photo and have it “Simpsonized”. This site is a complete hit or miss; actually it’s a miss. I have been trying to get something to work on the site since I discovered it over the weekend. Not once, in literally almost 50 attempts, has proved fruitful (those 50 attempts do not include the times the site did allow entry; either by error request or session control).

This would be an example of how not to do a movie tie-in. The site leaves the visitor with nothing but frustration and nothing of the “reason to believe” marketing folks so often use in their creative briefs. This launch date for the movie was established long ago, yet like so many ill-conceived promotions, they did not allow enough time to produce the products to the level that the market has come to expect from a global entertainment company.

For example compare the Simpsons movie site with Disney/Pixars Ratatouille. Hands down, the mouse or in this case the rat, delivers on the promise. Now, I don’t want to say the Simpsons have jumped the shark, but I think the lack of attention to some of these major promotional materials does not bode well for the Simpsons (both the movie and the recent lackluster seasons).

The time has come for MacHeist 2. The first MacHeist was such a huge success, even with the hiccups, that the directorate is back with more. Let’s hope some of the issues that hindered the overall experience have been ironed out. I am looking forward to participating in this one.

00:00 hrs - Airborne Landing Begins
03:00 hrs - Heavy Bombing Raids
04:00 hrs - Allied Invasion Fleet Arrives
6:30 hrs - U.S. Landings Begin
07:25 hrs - British and Canadian Landings Begin
12:00 hrs - British and Canadian forces push inland
16:00 hours - Hitler Authorizes German Counter-Attack
24:00 hours - D-Day ends

Normally, I would not comment on the happenings in the financial world, but today the Dow Jones broke 13 thousand. Quite a remarkable feat and here is a screengrab from my widget that tracks the stocks.

Even with my files backed up, getting the system back to the level of functionality that I had before the crash is a chore. All of the shortcuts, file structures, etc. had to be reestablished and I am just over half-way back to full function. My main goal was to get the client work back on line and in process to deliver and then my work and projects restored.

This probably sets me back a bit on the refresh of the site as well as some other products we have been working towards.. Ultimately, however, I learned to back up the hard in the early ’90s, so all critical information was safe and secure on multiple medias.