Just when I thought I could get back to doing actual development work on my website a bunch of interruptions arrive … ain’t it always the way! of course some of these have been coming for a while but nonetheless, everything seems to pile up …

EU Cookie Directive

This piece of legislation, which came in on 26th May 2011 (with 1 year for websites to comply) requires that websites explicitly tell users (a) what cookies they have and (b) what opt-out from those cookies they have. Well, that’s a very brief version of a large and complex subject that much better people than I can’t make head nor tail of! Basically, we have to expose the world of cookies to users, 99.99% of whom, I suspect, have no desire to know and the rest already know about!

For more info, 123.reg has a good article but it was attacat who really saved me time and brain-meltdown god bless ’em.

At first glance the task seems impossible, but picking through what our site actually does and taking a few leaves from attacat’s book (plus a nice little code snippet) has, I think, solved my problem. If you use UKTW then you may notice a new yellow icon bottom right … this is the attacat code snippet and my take on the information appropriate to meet requirements – I may well be wrong, but I am at least showing willing 🙂

Of course, everything, including this blog, should carry the same .. or is it just sites hosted in the EU … or just when a site is viewed from the EU … or … or …

Webfusion

I started hosting clients sites very many years ago and, to assist, became a Webfusion reseller. In the end I probably had 30 sites there but realised a couple of years ago (after a flurry of support emails) that they were never going to upgrade the servers hardware or software – though curiously I did find the systems upgraded after a mass hack attack a while back.

Then, just before my hols, they told me that the old Webfusion stuff was being decommissioned and all websites were being moved to Heart Internet. This pleased me as I have been a Heart Internet reseller for a while and they’re great.

However, there were a few issues, not least the phone call yesterday that everything was about to go off-line … it would seem that the migration was automatic if (and only if) your nameservers were with them – 10 of mine were not. I then started looking at the 10 sites they’d moved .. some were copies over 9 months old!! I was up till 03:30 this morning transferring databases and files … wouldn’t have taken so long but their “back-up to zip file” produces files that WinZip can’t read!

Demon

I have been with Demon since I started, modem, ISDN and broadband – I have a business account with a fixed IP and have chosen never to move. Now they contact me and say all their email is changing systems and I should expect some disruption … sigh

Next Job

My next job, if I need one, will NOT involve computers!!!!!!