Flexibility

Today we bring you our first joint blog post! Well, rather Ashley is typing and Paul is watching. All the other blog posts have been done independently. The past two days we've really felt some major spiritual warfare in the tech world.

The whole time we have been here we have been having issues with accessing files that live on the server and not in joomla. We've been having permission errors and this has prevented us from saving things in vertain files. Mostly, we wanted to do some cool CSS stuff. But, since cool CSS isn't necessary at the moment we've been working around this issue and not worrying about it.

Yesterday we were trucking along, making good progress when suddenly...dun dun dun! The live OM Canada site was down! This was a huge issue for us because that is where we are drawing most of our content from. That and it's not good to have your live site down.

We eventually figured out that it was down because the hosting company (the people who own the server that our site lives on) decided to upgrade their php (the language that our site runs on) in the middle of the day without telling us and the new php didn't want to play nice with the live site. Fortunately, they have super awesome customer service and it was fixed quickly.

This morning we walked in and saw that the live site was up and running  and felt pretty good. Until we realized that the site we are working on was down. We just can't win. Some investigation revealed that we had exceeded our memory limit. We found the file that sets the memory limit and found out that whoever built the file had set a variable as "memory_limi = 32MB". Well, that missing "t" in limit was causing all of our issues. We could have easily fixed this in 5 minutes except that the permission issue I described at the beginning of the post prevented us from doing so. So, we submitted a  request to the hosting company (less than 24 hours after submitting one for the live site) to fix the permissions issue. We weren't sure how long this would take so this is where the "flexibility" title is coming in.

We literally couldn't do anything, so we started pitching in with other office work putting Paul's envelope stuffing skills back in use. <sarcasm>Which he was incredibly thrilled about. </sarcasm> We did get to have some fun though, we used a machine that automatically stamped and sealed envelopes.

Dear offices of the world: obtain one - Yours truly, Paul.

Thankfully, an hour and  half later the awesome customer service had fixed the permissions error and another guy who helps out occasionally got the memory issue fixed. We have more of a functioning site put together, so if you want to check it out just navigate your browser to http://omcanada.org/joomla25. (And to prove to you that we are working). Feel free to give us any feedback on it, especially concerning menu navigation and usability. Note that if you see any forms, they don't work currently :) Thanks for the reading and have a blessed day!