It’s frustrating when people ask support questions with another motive in mind. For example, we get lots of tickets asking for a backup of their forums “so it’s safe”. When told that InvisionFree backs up all user forums so they don’t have to, they persist in asking for a MySQL dump “just in case”. Huh uh. Guess what they want? To switch hosts. Well me laddies, there is a little charge for that. Apply Conversion multimod and move on.
It really has been fun working the other side of the tech support table these last few years. Interesting to pick out the little quirks inherent to tech support that you then see when getting help from other companies’ tech teams. What you need to realize, whether you’re calling, writing, typing, whatever, is that the support people (usually) don’t know you from Adam. What they will know, however, is what you’re trying to hide, because they’ve seen the same trick 1,000 times before. Whether that means you broke your motherboard by plugging a card in backwards, or want a database dump, they’ve seen it. Just tell them what you really want, and more likely than not, they can still help. Promise.
I’ve completed the first stage of my website revamp. You’ll of course immediately notice the new look, but boy is there a lot of backend code that’s moving about too. My directory structure is considerably cleaner, and the new template is much, much better at separating structure from markup. Boy, do I love this new code. Not to mention that reading the site is orders of magnitude easier.
You can view the About page for more info on the scripts I’m using, but let’s just say there’s a lot of code involved in making things tick. Lots of WordPress plugins, especially.
Still to do:
- Header images for each section
- Index page
- Import photos
- New forum
- Clean up and check over code
- Profit!
I could sit here and edit this blog all day 
(Note: this mostly applies to InvisionFree users, but might apply to you too. I just needed a place to put it.)
So, you think that because I make my IM addresses publicly available, that I want to talk to you, eh? Well, let’s run down a set of criteria for IMing or otherwise harrassing me. My IM addresses are some of the easiest to obtain of all InvisionFree or ASO staff… I do this because I want to be available for those that really need immediate help. Let’s talk about what to and not to do.
Please note that if you don’t immediately identify yourself, where you come from, and why you’re IMing me, you’ll probably get blocked. It’s not that I don’t like you… I just get waaaay too many spambots, support requests, etc. to do anything but block, block, block.
And so we begin:
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It had totally been way too long since I had done something just a bit silly and crazy for someone… and it was getting boring around here! So tonight I was talking to my adopted freshman, Kristina, and she was quite bored, this being her first day of break and all. So, what’s better for boredom than ice cream! I drove over and picked her up and we went and got ice cream at Shake’s and sat in the car eating. She’s still so shy around me… but she’s getting better, for sure. And when I took her back home, she gave me a sort-of half side hug thing. So we’ll work on that some more She’s so cute! Hehehehe.
In other news, Torn decided he hated me and InvisionFree and left. That’s one of the biggest problems with running a business where most of the users are kids… they don’t take correction well. Sigh. I don’t like to lay the smack down, because it makes me feel mean… and I’m really not! But somebody’s gotta do it. And life goes on.
I was sitting about thinking of ideas for the new blog and website redesign. A few thoughts before I forget them all, forever.
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