Heh, it was down for about 2.5 hours in total. Let me quickly address the issues raised here. The hand doesn't exactly feed me, in fact I guess you could say I've been feeding (helping) him for the past week. I've been helping him customising and extending something free of charge, no money involved. Since I've grown to know Bob a bit better, I knew how he would react to the situation. Hence the digg attempt, to see if any publicity could be drawn out of it (albeit it failed miserably, and probably wasn't my brightest idea). As for being a kid, I don't know if 22 in January qualifies, but that's up to you to decide. But professionally speaking, I probably work to a much higher standard than most, as anyone who has ever come to me for support would testify. Luckily for me, my work speaks for itself (bar the odd typo in testing), so no, I'm not worried about reputation over a "questionable" link-bait attempt. I did test the code on my own server, even ran through the cron once. Since I had been developing the module for first use on John Cow, we obviously had to test it under the right load conditions. Most likely I realised the need for an extra check layer at the last minute, added it in, and sent the code then. And to anyone who would like to say "it shouldn't have happened", I challenge you to shown me any developer where something like that hasn't occurred in pre-production code. And finally, sometimes you just have to be light-hearted over a series of events. I couldn't believe it when I realised the code was stuck there, and I wasn't able to access it, whilst he had just gone off to get plastered (my first reaction was not amusement!).
Great explanation! That definitely shut up most people in this thread, 2.5 hours is nothing. You laughing about it has probably helped his traffic stats now, since nobody new it was down in the first place!
I said it shouldn't have happened because it should have been picked up in the testing phase, before it was placed on the site. Most people forget that testing rigorously in all possible conditions is so important.
I didn't really write it to 'shut them up' exactly. From the information I gave them initially, their reaction was largely justified. But once I realised that things were stuck, and I couldn't get a hold of him, I wanted to see whether I could at least get some traffic for the site using it.
I'm not disputing that. But mistakes happen. In hindsight of course, I should never have allowed the code to be sent without first getting some kind of FTP or admin access, so I could sort any issues out straight away. Lesson learnt.
if you ask me john cow deserves a sueing, though I love his header and site design - mooney *chuckle*
I'm an advertiser(1 Cool File) with John Cow and also a programmer. You can test all you want but mistakes will happen like it or not. Will I want my $0.43 back for 2h30 of lost revenue? Hell No! Should he had made it public? No but he learned from that. No more talk of shooting people. Watch Shout'Em UP! instead because it's less painful.
Considering that Simon is developing and incredibly versatile plugin on his own without the help of a development team, what he managed to create here for bloggers looking to monetize their site is an amazing piece of work, especially considering he has limited resources to work with. Instead of acting like a bunch of grumpy gassy fartknocking douchebag Scrooge monkeys, why not give the man a little bit of credit for what he's accomplished thus far? So the site was down for 2.5 hours. If there's an issue of losing dollars, it's easily solved by simply extending the current advertisers' campaign for another 2.5 hours. It's not rocket science. Remember there's no such thing as bad publicity either. Merry Christmas!