I recently had occasion to order from Eastbay.com. There was a minor glitch in their website. They responded to my comments on the issue and made an appropriate adjustment. This is the second time I have had a customer service issue with them and both times they were prompt, appropriate and cheerful. This is a company I well definitely do further business with.

One really cool thing about their website is their sizing information that shows what sizes of a particular shoe are in stock. I really appreciated this feature once I caught on to it. It allowed me to quickly roll through several shoe models and see if they had the size I needed. I also found their information very helpful in regards whether a shoe ran true to size, or was over/under sized. Great info, great site as far as I was concerned.

I recently decided to create a quick and dirty php form to insert data into a mySQL data base. It seems simple enough of course (and I’ve done it hundreds of times). As with all programming issues, something goes wrong and it’s simple and yet you stare at it for hours! (That’s an exaggeration, its only been ten minutes 😉 but it sounds better that way).

So here are the steps I followed:
1. I created a database using php my admin and then created a table in it:
CREATE TABLE `databasename`.`tablename` (
`id` INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY ,
`title` VARCHAR( 100 ) NULL ,
`long` SMALLINT NULL ,
`lat` SMALLINT NULL ,
) ENGINE = MYISAM

I have already caused my own problem … but I don’t know it yet. Can you spot the problem? Read on to find the answer! Read the rest of this entry »

I just find Ebay difficult. Recently my kid bought an item on Ebay, a clear plastic phone case, and it was not what it was supposed to be. It just did not fit the phone, not even a little. We tried three times to contact the seller to request refund/return information. We heard exactly nothing!

What else can you do? We opened a dispute on Paypal and they eventually issued a refund for the item and we did return it. Of course they want you to return a $10 item in a fashion that allows it to be tracked … and of course it would cost about $8 to do that, so what’s the point really right? So we just returned it the old fashioned way, by mail.

Next, we get an unpaid item strike from Ebay because we didn’t pay for the item … even though Ebay clearly shows that the item was REFUNDED — hence it must have been paid for. Seems kind of silly.

They did remove the unpaid item strike, but they said this:

Thank you for contacting eBay concerning the Unpaid Item strike you received.

Our records indicate that this is the first Unpaid Item strike you have appealed. Based on your effort to contact us, and the information you have provided, we have removed the Strike from your file.

Of course you should remove the strike, it never occurred and if you paid attention to your own data, you would have known it.

I find dealing directly with sellers or buyers on craigs list to be ever so much more enjoyable to be honest and there seems to be a big trend to Craigs List and away from Ebay among my friends. At least there you don’t expect someone to be helpful to you. It’s too bad that ebay owns some of Craigs List (see very bottom – acquired 25% interest in 2004), because frankly, they might ruin Craigs List first chance they get.

Meanwhile if you are looking at an item by shoparound168 I hope you have better luck than I did.

I haven’t looked at a site for a bit in Internet Explorer. I just don’t like the program and since Firefox began, I have not used it except when working on a web page to see if it works well in IE.

Today I was working on my own site, Bestfoot.com — home of Bestfoot Web Design, and so I decided I better check it in Internet Explorer. I have not worked on my site in years. I have done many many website redesigns, but like the cobbler’s kids, my site had no shoes.

I redid the look a bit and thought, perfect, a new top banner that was crisp and clean — until I went to look at the site in Internet Explorer and it was pixelated and looked horrible. I had no idea I had changed settings a while ago. Fortunately I happened on to Ryan McFarland’s right away and it had the answer for me. Turns out my image was crisp and Internet Explorer was the problem.

Now people who need help with their web page may be able to see that I’m not stuck in 1998 with my former page that I had ignored for nearly ten years! The irony of this whole thing is my specialty might be described as taking your web site or pages that badly need to be updated and doing the job for you or your company. About time I did it for myself.

Great news! According to Net Applications Firefox has now crosses the 20 percent mark for worldwide browser usage.

Read more at the Mozilla blog.

I indicated that I had experience uncommonly slow loads on their home page. They immediately called and followed up by email. That is really impressive! Way to go at an issue Godaddy. I wish all companies were as responsive and caring. I wasn’t even asking for help, just making an objective statement. They of course are calling at a time when I will never be home, but that is beside the point. They have called three different days in an effort to follow up.

They have asked me to run a trace route. I did that today from my day connection (dial up at 54k — yep people still use them) and got 9 hops … and a slow load. I am happy to say that I tried it a my night connection (which is higher speed) and got 13 hops including one time out, but the page itself loaded as fast as I have ever seen in load — I’d estimate it was less than a minute vs the three or four minutes or more I often experience.

Logging in took only seconds tonight and getting my domain manager up wasn’t fast, but it wasn’t slow either and obviously it has to pull information from a database, so I’d call the load time acceptable this evening. I didn’t actually time it, but estimated it and watched the clock on the task bar (usually I can time the loads by the number of minutes).

As I said in my first post, I really like godaddy.com. I always have, despite their model fixation … 🙂

Anyway my point after all of this rambling is that this operation is all over customer service, and I enjoy doing business with them. Thank you godaddy for caring.

p.s. I’ll get you guys some trace route info in the next day or two. Thank you for your persistence in making sure that I have the experience I should.

I use godaddy.com to register most of my domain names. Why, because they are reasonably priced, there is no issue as to who owns the name, and they are reasonably useable … except, it seems that their site is one of the slowest sites I visit. It takes forever to load on a dial up account (I sometimes still use dial up) and a long time to load on high speed.

It seems ironic to me that a site that, when it finally does load, boast fast/reliable hosting for your clients cannot themselves make their site sing. I am waiting as I write this for a page to load in godaddy … not yet … And it isn’t just now, it is a routine issue.

Update: Wow godaddy.com can be impressive. I get home and a nice lady from godaddy has called me to see what they can do to help. I did not return the call because they don’t have a 1-800 number (like most computer folks seem to have these days – that is my other big complaint about them — when something goes wrong I spend a long time on the phone on my dime), but I can suggest that they use the contact form on this site if they would like to chat further. I am impressed that you read my blog, I am even more impressed that you cared enough to call and see if we could work something out. Thank you for that.

Here are some initial suggestions:
I get the picture of Danica plenty fast. To be honest, I’ve never been into fast women, I’d actually like to get to my log in, one of the last things to appear on the page. Once I log in, it takes forever to actually get to the next page, if I even do, and when I go to manage domains, I can make a whole lunch while waiting for it to develop on dial up. On high speed, I can only make a sandwich. And … let you think I’m exaggerating … well maybe, but not by much. It is a really slow site. Send Danica out and she can watch it with me (she’s near the mid-west on occaision). I bet she’d get bored and leave before it was done.

I use CPanels, PHP myadmin, wordpress, drupal, mybb, phpbb, etc. etc. and none of them are as slow as using your main page and my domain management interface.