What's New? - early-March, 2015

March 1-10
	*Please click on the symbol on the left to follow me on Twitter and see a few of my photos there. My Twitter account is @PeterEdinPhoto.*
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*But I now no longer have a Facebook page. I joined Facebook for a while last year, but it was taking up too much of my time, so I'm not now using Facebook.*

Mar 7, 2015

Business as usual, again - I hope!

Web site

I've spent a lot of time over the past month working on a variety of problems that have occurred with the EdinPhoto web site - most recently, the news from my web site host, 'FastHosts', that any files that include a '+ in their name will no longer work.

It' has taken all my spare time over the past five days to search all of EdinPhoto's 71,583 files, then change the names of each of the 3,067 files that included a '+' .

I hope all will be working well again now, and that I'll be able to turn my attention again to adding more content to the EdinPhoto web site.

However, if you find anything on the site that appears not to be working, please email me to let me know. Thank you.

emails

I've had less time available to reply to emails recently. I've tried to send prompt replies to the emails that appeared to be the most urgent, but my backlog of other emails has been steadily increasing and I now have 695 emails that I still need to reply to

I expect it to take me about 10 minutes each to reply to many of the emails, including finding contact details and adding brief updates to the EdinPhoto web site, but some of the longer, more complex emails in the past have taken me 4 hours or longer to reply to, so it's going to take me a long time to catch up again!

Peter Stubbs: Edinburgh: March 7, 2015

no update

but there should be some soon!

Mar 3, 2015

Sorry! No more EdinPhoto updates for a few days yet.

The Problem

I'm still trying to get the EdinPhoto site to display all the pages correctly, as it did until last week. It is currently giving lots of Errors 403 and 404. I now know the cause of the problem. Thank you to David King, Trinity, Edinburgh for investigating.

FastHosts tell me that they started using a new 'Security Filtering' program last week and it does not accept any files with a '+' in their name. (I'm not aware of any warning or notification that they made about this change.) The EdinPhoto web site has lots of files with a '+' in their nam, and these are the files that are producing all the Errors 403 and 404.

Update

I'll have to be careful not to be too hasty in blaming FastHosts for this situation. I've been reading on the Internet and have discovered that this issue extends well beyond FastHosts, and seems to be the result of a recent initiative by Microsoft to tighten the rules for naming files, in order to overcome some ,security problems.

The Solution

I need to find all the files on the web site that have a '+' in their name, then change the names of them all. There does nothing that FastHosts or I can do to automate this, so I've spent 12 hours today working my way through the first 15,000 files on the EdinPhoto site looking for any files with a '+' in their name than changing the names. I found 744 with names that needed to be changed.

I still have another 57,000 files to look through, so it's going to take me a while to complete the job - and I'm not going to have time to answer emails while I'm working on it. Let's hope everything returns to normal soon!

Peter Stubbs: Edinburgh: March 3, 2015: updated Mar 9, 2015

no updates

Mar 1, 2015

Unfortunately, no EdinPhoto updates from me today!

I've spent most of the weekend trying to solve a problem resulting from changes at made at FastHosts, the company that hosts the web site. This problem has prevented many of the EdinPhoto images being displayed. You may have noticed!

Peter Stubbs: Edinburgh: March 1, 2015

no updates