posted a photo http://pi.pe/80ceck
Key to the calendar. Yellow: days when Vox worked normally. Pink: days when the compose screen took minutes or hours to load. Red: days when Vox would not allow me to compose at all.
I’m sure most of you will agree that putting up with a compose screen that will not load for hours or days since October 28 is being pretty patient.
In that time, Daisy and Six Apart have been great at trying to help me troubleshoot why this is happening. They have confirmed that there is something wrong and that, even at Six Apart HQ in California, they cannot get the compose screen to come up when logged on as me.
A number of solutions have been proposed, but despite carrying them out, the loading delay remains intolerably long.
It’s as though the Six Apart servers (after becoming self-aware!) know it’s me and fail to serve the compose page. No code is downloaded.
I remain convinced that whatever is happening to me is connected to what happened to Patricia (who has only made 50-odd posts on Vox, but has exactly the same symptoms) and Ninja (who can no longer compose with this site without switching to Internet Explorer—Vox is the only site which he has to make a browser switch for). I also believe the bug is connected to the one that locked out all the Australians I knew on this service in August 2009.
We also have the mysterious period between November 16 and 18 when the site operated normally, and the compose screen came up on demand. What happened on those three days? I had more tags in my account than when the site first blocked me from composing, and possibly more neighbours. Yet for those days, everything was normal here.
I have never suggested seriously that the block was malicious (though it was fun to entertain some outlandish theories), but it does seem to be rather coincidental that I come across bugs on Vox, Blogger, Facebook and other services continually. Many have been documented on this blog. I just never thought that among the last regular blog posts, the bugs I write about would be Vox’s.
One day I am sure they will find the error, or there will be a new version of Vox which remedies it. The underlying code is updated a lot more frequently with incremental improvements than Team Vox will have us know. Until then, I will check in here periodically—to read your posts, delete spammers, and administer the many groups that I run—but we will have to say farewell to my regular updates. I will also click on ‘Create’ from time to time to see if the bug has been fixed, and, if the site ever lets me, post the odd private neighbourhood or friends-only entry.
Finally, you could say, my disappointment outweighed my patience. As some of you read in a private post yesterday, this is a good time to move on.
Vox is, after all, still in beta, if its terms and conditions (revised a few months ago) are to be believed, so there’s no point my getting mad about this. It is what I signed up for in 2006 when I began as a Vox beta tester. Three years on, it appears I was still in the same boat, but with a less reliable site.
Thank you for all your friendships over the last three years. I have enjoyed it and everything this blog has offered. You can still find me on Facebook (a site with far worse issues than Vox ever had), Tumblr and at my main blog, where I am already ramping up the posting I do. I have a campaign site for the 2010 mayoral election here in Wellington, and will offer occasional commentary at Lucire’s web edition. If the Vox cravings get too much, I might enter the odd thing at lucire.vox.com, but even that account began to fail a few days ago.
This is not a total farewell. In the words of Gen Douglas MacArthur, ‘I shall return.’
A sunny day in Wellington, even if it took over half a day to get a compose screen on Vox. I’m already blogging more on Blogger, so I suspect these posts will become fewer (and not out of choice). This was around 5 p.m. today:
Not sure how many hours it has been since Vox was capable of loading a compose window for me. I lost count. I no longer believe that deleting tags has helped, especially as it is now 2.20 a.m. and I had no access to Vox all evening. Please write me with your next theory, Vox.
As a result of the return to terrible load times, Kimmie’s theory about a dodgy neighbour might still be true. I haven’t deleted everyone from my neighbourhood and started from scratch, which is arguably the next step, if I have sufficient time to waste.
I have downloaded Firebug (thanks to my friend Andrew Carr-Smith) to see what data Vox loads on to my browser in the times I get a blank compose screen. Answer: none. Nothing even begins to load.
I still think the Vox server knows when it’s me, Patricia or Ninja, or any of the others who might have left here without telling us why, and fails to serve any compose screen to us. I still reckon that there is something peculiar about our accounts that the programming does not like.
I’m getting paranoid importing from YouTube because of the tags they introduce, and tags might be one of the reasons it takes me hours to get a compose screen on Vox. However, this one came up on demand, which is a relief.
I showed this to my neighbourhood yesterday, but as the YouTube one is public, I have no problems sharing it more widely. It was my TV appearance last month on CTV, with Angela and Megan on Good Living. This was not networked, but it was very fun to do. The set reminded me a bit of the Good Morning one at Avalon, except I got one thing that I was promised but never got: a subtitle with both my and Lucire’s names.
Statistics: I have stripped out 6 kbyte worth of tags from the 260 kbyte I had yesterday afternoon. The file is now c. 254 kbyte. Pretty sucky for nearly four hours’ work, but we are talking about undoing three years of blogging here.
I can’t say I’ve noticed major improvements to Vox’s compose screen coming up. I suppose one could say this now takes minutes rather than hours or days, and it sometimes comes up without a refresh (if you give it a quarter- or half-hour).
Back to work.
Vivimos en la actualidad en un mundo marcado por lo virtual. Específicamente en el mundo del Facebook, Twitter, My Space, y Hi 5 (entre otros). Hace diez años nadie soñaba con pertenecer a una red social o en poseer una bitácora personal. En lo que nos concierne, esta era digital que nos invade, la hemos aprovechado a través del blog “Juegos de Poder”. Gracias a esta vitrina hemos podido conectarnos con miles de personas de todas las nacionalidades. Ahora esa conectividad la ampliamos con otra herramienta útil de la era 2.0: Twitter. Con ella buscamos consolidar este proyecto, acercando y extendiendo nuestras ideas y mensajes a más cibernautas. Sean bienvenidos y disfruten de esta nueva experiencia.
You’ve worked hard to create the perfect exhibit and the most effective marketing materials for your trade show debut. But it’s not only the attractiveness of your exhibit that will determine the success of your booth, but also how your staff interacts with your prospective customers. You need to set clear goals for your trade show staff, so that they know what is expected of each of them.
Once prospective customers begin entering your booth, it’s your employee’s job to greet everyone, make them feel welcome and assist them with anything they need. The employees you’ve chosen to help you staff the trade show booth need to be:
Respectful of the company and its mission
Knowledgeable about the company and its products and/or services
Knowledgeable about the marketing campaign and its message
Have a professional appearance
In addition, they need to actively listen to your prospective customers, be gracious and kind. Don’t forget your booth should be manned at all times, by either you or one of your employees. This will allow you to examine the latest trends and technology in your industry by checking out your competitor’s booth. Once you have gone over the etiquette rules with your employees, your trade show booth is sure to be a success.
The most successful marketing campaigns are carefully researched, well-thought out and properly executed. When it comes to planning a marketing campaign, there are several things that a marketing executive should keep in mind.
Objectives
What is the purpose of your marketing campaign? Is it to generate more sales, attract new customers, increase brand awareness, drive traffic to your website or collect contact information.
Target Audience
You should know who your target audience is. Are they lawyers, first time homeowners or students? In addition, you should decide whether you want to market to existing or prospective customers.
Choosing the proper marketing media
You should consider how you want to market your product or service. Do you want to do a direct mail campaign, affiliate marketing campaign, email marketing campaign, telemarketing campaign or a combination of two or more. Who is your competition? And what makes your product stand apart from others?
Budget
Do you already have a budget? You can ask the marketing company you work with the marketing strategies that will fit your budget.
Fulfillment Process
What is your fulfillment process? Do you have a staff to help you sort, pack and ship the marketing materials or will you be doing this yourself? If you’re sending out a large number of marketing materials or you don’t have the time to do it yourself, it’s best to hire a fulfillment company or a marketing firm that can do all this for you.
Marketing Message
Do you already have a marketing message? It should be an appealing message that talks about the benefits of the product or service.
These tips will help new and experienced marketing professionals plan a successful marketing campaign.
