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Website/Australian Daily Prayer app back up (again)

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For the last two weeks, all my ampers sites have been down, along with the Australian Daily Prayer app. This was caused at my hosters end, where they had two major server failures and then they had to manually restore everyone’s account.

I don’t pay for hosting, so on one level, I am grateful that they put in the effort in restoring all my data, even though they don’t get anything out of it.

This is the second major outage my site has experienced this year, the previous one was over SSL certs. I do hope this isn’t going to be a trend form my hosters.

Anyway, everything seems to be up and running again, thank you for your patience.

Website/Australian Daily Prayer app back up

ampers Leave a comment

About two or three weeks ago my website SSL certificate expired, which caused a “Not secure” warning to be displayed on all my sites and it also broke the Australian Daily Prayer app.

It tuned out that my free hosters had an issue with their LetsEncrypt process, so I tried a few things to get everything up and running again. I got a 90 day SSL cert from zerossl.com. This allowed my main site ampers.x10.mx to work. But that didn’t solve my Daily Prayer app issues or my subdomains.

I then tried to find a free wildcard SSL service (I found three different ones), but all of those required you to have access to enter a DNS TXT (entry which my hoster didn’t allow) or to place a file in a folder called /.well-known/acme-challenge. I found that I couldn’t place anything in the /acme-challenge folder as I would always get a 404. Again this was a setting on my hosters end.

Today my hosters got their LetsEncrypt process up and running again, which means I also got my subdomains and app back up and running.

Sorry to everyone for the downtime. I do this stuff as a hobby and because I am cheap I try not to pay for hosting or SSL certificates.

Australian Daily Prayer website fix

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Since around mid December, my web hoster has been transferring their free sites from cPanel to DirectAdmin. In this process, it meant that the Australian Daily Prayer website, and by extension the app as well, stopped working.

Once I was able to log back in there was some subdomain permission settings and SSL certs that needed to be set up. It seems to be going ok.

I think there is a display bug in the android app, in that it doesn’t deal with you selecting any old date, as it will display the same readings and prayers for whatever the current day is. (The website allow you to go to any date). I will try and find time to tweak this.

This move also broke my New City Catechism and multiply subdomains, but they too are back up and running again.

Website and apps are back up

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This website has been down for nearly a week, but today it came back up. I use a free web hoster so I really can’t complain too much, as you do get what you pay for. While waiting for this to come back up I did set up a new account with another free hoster and was seriously considering moving everything off this site to them. That would mean a fair bit of re-setting up (emails, web apps, domains, app updates etc), so I am kinda glad I didn’t have to do that.

The Australian Daily Prayer app is dependent on this site to pass the readings and prayers of the day to it. This meant that for the last week the app has been broken, displaying a connection error. Thank you to those who emailed me to let me know that the app wasn’t working. As you can see now, this site is back up, and so is the app.

Canberra Men’s & Women’s Christian Convention websites

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I have been a bit quite on the app front. (I have recently picked up an extra role at church, so this may mean even less time for apps.) However, I do help out with Canberra Christian Conventions with their website.

We have just released the new sites for the Men’s and Women’s conventions this year.

The images we used this year were taken and tweaked by our communications team. I’m really happy how they have turned out. Making them ourselves means we had lots of flexibility and optiones on what we could take that was consistent within the theme.

Some of the features of the sites are:

  • Using the Divi WordPress theme
  • Email pop up that allows you to copy and past a pre-written email in your mail client, or if you use Gmail a button to do that automatically for you
  • Correct use of meta fields for Facebook sharing
  • The forms are JavaScripted in by elvanto and are then custom styled within the site
  • Google maps are themed using Snazzy Maps
  • I also turned on the SSL certificate we got with our hosting so everything is on https

Overall I think these two conference sites are up there with the best Australian Christian conference websites available (and we looked at a few for ideas). Check these conferences out at:

https://canberrachristianconventions.org.au/womens
https://canberrachristianconventions.org.au/mens

Canberra Christian Conventions new site

ampers 2 Comments

ccc_siteAs hinted in my last post, I have now added to my website portfolio page one more site.

I have been helping out with Canberra Christian Conventions for maybe two years now. I sit on the Requip team and do things for their website. A while ago they bought the theme The7 and I helped roll that out to their conference arms (Mens, Womens and Requip) to better advertise their events. The main site however was getting more and more long in the tooth. Anyway, after some work, last night we made the main site go live.

While The7 is a robust WordPress theme, it still didn’t do what we wanted it to do for our homepage, so I coded it myself. The homepage has three distinct layouts for different size screens, and if the conferences have more than one image they want to display (sometimes Requip has 2 or 3 conferences on the go at the same time), the page will randomly pick one to display on the homepage (at the moment they all have one image).

I also tried to mimic the top nav bar for desktop and mobile. Personally I don’t like the mobile navigation, but since that is what the theme does, I tried, as much as I could, without relying onany extra javascript libraries to pull it off. And it kinda works alright.

I have heard that on iPhones the page “sticks” to the top. I am yet to get my hands on an iPhone to test and see what it does. If you have any other comments about the site and how it performs in different browsers, please let me know.

Websites

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ampers websiteI have updated the theme for this site. I was getting a bit bored of it and I think this one looks simpler and might be quicker to navigate.

The new theme is a free one called TA Portfolio. I have made a few adjustments, such as colour, image sizes, hiding titles to fields I leave blank and threw in a timeline, just because I could.

Now that the theme has been improved, I think I should also go back and improve the wording and images on the portfolio pages. But all in good time.

I have also added a website portfolio item to showcase some other sites I have made. There is another web site I will add to that portfolio page, but I am going to wait till the new update is live (stay tuned).