Today’s news

There’s barely a day goes by at the moment without there being some kind of news. Firstly, the new Malbec web site. As I mentioned in my last post, a week or so ago we lost the original web site that I created for Malbec airfield. I received no notification that it was going to happen, but to be fair, some months ago I also lost the free email address that I’d used when I set the site up and they probably sent me a message on that that I wouldn’t have received to tell me that it was going to happen.

Anyway, I’ve worked pretty solidly over the past few days and the week-end to create a replacement using another free web-site service (yes, they do exist, you just have to compromise a bit over the domain name) and ended up working into the early hours of this morning to finish it off. In fact I’ve created two replacements in that time. The first one turned out to be incredibly slow and kept throwing up database connection errors. This was probably because it was on an Indian web host’s servers where local demand is very high, although to a point I was prepared to live with that.

However, the deal-breaker (if you can call signing up for a free service a ‘deal’) came when I couldn’t get email to work. The Malbec web site, like My Trike, has a ‘Contact’ facility with a pre-defined form that uses a special server email function. This can have two problems. Firstly, if the server is recognised by recipient email servers (like Gmail and MS Outlook) as having a reputation for spam, then any messages generated by the form will be filtered out and deleted before they get to their destinations even though they are not spam. The second problem is that if the web server is overloaded and running slowly, its email function will time-out and the messages will never actually be sent.

I think that my first choice of a replacement free web site service suffered fom both of those problems because although in testing a very few messages did get through, the majority didn’t and none were delivered to Gmail and Outlook addresses, which have strong spam filters. So I was forced to look for yet another replacement and actually this did me a huge favour because although I wasted a lot of time signing up for several free services that I then immediately rejected, either because I didn’t like the style of the free domain names that were on offer or because only after signing up did I find that email was a ‘paid-for’ extra, I eventually came across an amazing free service offered by x10hosting.com.

This has turned out to be unbelievably good, although not for the inexperienced as they don’t offer much in the way of basic help. They expect you to know what you’re doing, which suits me as I guess that that discourages them from being swamped by newbies clogging up their servers and slowing them down. As a result, the new Malbec web site has turned out to be much better than the old one that was lost, much faster and with all of the facilities that I needed for it to do what I wanted it to. Here’s a shot of the finished home page which if clicked on will take you through to the actual Malbec web site itself.

So that has been a big win. The next thing that happened today was a car drew up on the roadside outside my caravan and a lady got out clutching several sheets of paper and a map. It turned out that she was a surveyor, on behalf of EDF, Enedis or SDE24 I didn’t quite catch, although I think the latter, and her job was to get the new electric cable that was laid last week permanently marked on the map. She said that I will be connected up very soon now, but experience tells me that there’s a large discrepancy between the French idea of ‘soon’ and my own, so I’ll just go on waiting… patiently… NOT 😐

I finished off my last post talking about acorns and how I’ve been plagued by them dropping everywhere and on my caravan roof. Today I’ve suffered from another plague – ladybirds! We had a cold night last night and I had to get up and put more covers on my bed, but this morning it turned out to be somewhet weirdly quite warm but foggy. The fog burnt off and we’ve had a gorgeous warm, sunny afternoon and I’ve been going out and about in just a tee shirt (you know what I mean… ).

I don’t know where they all came from, but by the early afternoon the air was full of millions of ladybirds, most of whom it seemed wanted to join me in my caravan. As fast as I could catch and throw one out, two or more would come flying in and in the late afternoon as the sun was beginning to dip below the trees on the other side of the road, you could see millions of tiny ladybird wings shimmering in its rays.

I threw dozens out but quite a few are still with me in the caravan. Sadly, you can’t convince them that they belong outside and experience tells you that they will end up as tiny, brightly coloured, dry, shrivelled husks on the windowsills and elsewhere. Nature, I guess, has always been thus… 🙁