Commenting Restored

We had some sort of issue that went under the radar on August 6th that affected the ability to leave comments. I have been out of commission a bit over the last week and didn’t realize this until I found several contact attempts in my spam box. This problem is now fixed and I apologize about any inconvenience.

This problem affected some other functions of the site as well and I think they are all returned to proper working order as well, but if you find something messed up, please let me know here or via contact form. Thanks.

I’d also like to take this moment to say how much I appreciate everyone that reads Mobilitysite. It’s truly a pleasure knowing that so many people enjoy what we are sharing here.

Going Back to Forum Commenting Only?

I have waffling back and forth on this. I have had a bunch of requests to allow for forum commenting again. The problem is, I really want to have one or the other. Having two conversations on the same story is tough to follow. I am considering finding the guy that helped me bridge the comment before and hiring him back again. What do you think? One thing to note, if I do go back to forum commenting, I will have it set up where there can be "unregistered user" comments too. The will be moderated, but it will keep people form having to register in the forums if they don’t want to.

What do you think?

Chris’ Vacation and iPhone Line in New York

Nope. I didn’t take vacation to stand in line like those folks in New York. They’ve been lined up for a few days already. Wow. Anyhow, for the 1st time in a LONG TIME, I took vacation and just lounged around my house with the wife and kids. I normally take vacation from my day job to go to a trade show like CES or a event like Mobius or the MVP Summit. In addition, I decided to stay away from the sites for a week too. I needed a serious break. It was fun, but I did miss the site.

I am back. Did ya miss me?

Leaked Photos… Should we or Shouldn’t we?

That is the question asked by Charlie from Nokia.

We think it’s great that folks are dying to see our devices. Can you imagine if there was a leak and no one cared? Ugh.

Obviously, we’d like to ask folks to do less peddling in our trade secrets. It puts folks at risk and screws things up for the Nokia and for other companies, too. I think really that there are only a small number of folks who really go too far in trying to procure leaked material. But if we cut down on our enthusiasm for leaked materials, then the thrill of being the one to post about it will be reduced.

Matt Miller chimes in on the subject as a result. Matt is a stand up guy that I have had the pleasure to be friends with for many years now and I admire his outlooks on the online world.

Should I be posting links to device rumors here on this blog? That is something I’ll definitely be giving more thought to the next time I hear of a device rumor. It is tough not to report the news when it is out all over the place, then again I will never post on a device someone may happen to send me if it is not allowed by the manufacturer/carrier (there goes any chance of someone sneaking me something, huh?). While your page views may skyrocket if you post images on an unannounced product, the long term impact may not be worth it. I think posting thorough detailed reviews of products when they are announced is a better strategy and my page views for my product reviews back this up so I’ll stick with providing you with more detailed information rather than speculation.

Running Aximsite and iPaqHQ in their last years of those devices lives, I had the chance to blow some big stories. (mainly on Aximsite) I chose to keep to myself on everything shared with me unofficially. I was under NDA for some aspects, but some things I was free. Most of what I learned, eventually came to light. Some of the leads were dead though. So, here is my take on the subject…

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How are we doing?

One thing that is great about running my sites as a hobby and not having to worry about income, pressure from sponsors or corporate ownership is that we can do what we want, say what we want, and cover what we want. Of course this is how I do things here on the Mobilitysite front page. If I find it to be interesting, I post about it. You will see my focus sway with what’s hot or my flavor of the month. The other contributors are the same. Look at Frank (Ctitanic)… He posts about what he like, UMPC. The diversity of the contributors we’ve put together make it great for those that might not like what I like, but do like what Frank like. You may not like to see a software review, but you might enjoy Jack’s latest Bluetooth review.

One thing that I did learn in the early years of Aximsite and in my opinion, one things that made Aximsite so successful was user feedback. I would often take user feedback and act on it. What use is a community if it doesn’t allow for feedback, right? So, here I am asking for this feedback today.

I urge you to take the time out to post a comment to let us know what you like or don’t like. What do you want to see more or less of? Thanks again.

Happy Father’s Day

From everyone at Mobilitysite, Happy Father’s Day.

The kids got me a real nice checkbook wallet! My parents got me a Dale Murphy Print and now I am off to celebrate with my in-laws. Hope all you have a super father’s day!

Still Running Slow at the Planet…

I have to apologize. I posted this one this morning and updated it thinking we were fixed. As of Midnight, we still are not fixed.

Please be patient and I am truly sorry for all the problems we have been having. If it’s not resolved tomorrow, we may have to switch to another company. This will lead to a little more downtime, but we may find ourselves in better hands.

A new problem at The Planet - My Apologies

I write this as I am 15 minutes into a “more than 20 minute” hold queue for support at the Planet. By now, I am sure all of you have heard about their snafu that took us down for more than 72 hours.

Update - 9:30am - I think it’s fixed again. 

In the process of getting out of this 72 hour outage that we experienced due to the Planet’s explosion and their rushed support, several tickets were opened. I asked that they all be merged. They weren’t. Well, as you know from my post on chrisleckness.com and mobilitysite.com we were finally fixed at 11:30pm CST Tuesday. Everything was lightning fast again and I was happy finally.

Last night, I decided to take a few hours of AFK time. Since I do this as a hobby, I work all day and come home to maintain the sites, etc. It wasn’t until 11pm or so that I noticed an update on one of the “other” tickets on my account. This update wasn’t closing it or merging it. It had been 28 hours since this particular ticket was touched and all of a sudden, it has activity…

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Gallery Fixed - Enter the Contest Now!

It seems that some of the most important readers were left in the cold on this. The permissions of the gallery had left the “contributing members” of the site out. All members are important, but these guys are in their own separate user group on the site and they had the same permissions that a guest of the gallery have. This is now fixed and everyone that should be able to upload photos can. Sorry for the inconvience.

Now head over to the contest for the rules, etc…
Contest - Win a Nokia N95 from Mobilitysite!

Contest Reminders and Demographics

I lied, I thought I was going to bed, but I didn’t. I’ve gotten more than 1,000 emails after spam filter tonight once the server started acting right. I have filtered through them and put most on hold, but the one reporting the results of our little demographics survey caught my attention. It also reminded me to remind you all about the current contests. So 1st the contests…

• Helium Digital Bluetooth Headset - There is still time on this one.
• Win a Nokia N95 from Mobilitysite! - Definatly more time on this one too.

So… Who reads Mobilitysite and Aximsite?

Surprisingly, 90% of the readers are male. I knew this would be high, but not that high. 59% are between the ages of 25-44. Woohoo… 80% of those that responded visit the site at least daily and more than 75% of you use most of the resources we offer, the news, reviews, forums, etc… 37% of you are AT&T users. That is a big percentage. Sprint was #2 with 13%.  The rest of it had to do with spending and such and I don’t care about that. The advertisers do, but not me :)

Thanks to everyone that has done the survey so far. There is still time though. Link

We are back in action

Ok, I want to start off by apologizing for being out of service since last Saturday. Over the weekend, The Planet, which is our hosting company, had an explosion that knocked out power to the data center that we use. Monday morning power was restored. Unfortunately, we still had issues. 1st it was internal networking problems with their name servers. We finally got a tech support person to dig deep and he was able to find that their was a problem in our revolvers config. That and we were getting slammed by bots at the same time made for 4-10 minute page loads. It was a weird problem and I am very happen that we finally got it fixed.

I want to thank everyone for the emails, tweets, posts, etc in support of this issue. Thanks to Julie for updating twitter with the status. It was a very low time for me and I was very frustrated. I took being up 99.8% of the time for granted. I am so happy to have our collective voice back.

Another issue that was brought up with all this is ads on the site. There were some ads that expanded over the content that were implemented shortly before we went down. Those have been removed too. I have requested that our new ad agency not serve those type ads on our site. Sorry for the inconvenience.

As always, I will refund each one of the readers their monthly fees for viewing this site to make up for the downtime. Wait, it’s free… nevermind. We have some catching up to do everyone. I’ll get on that tommorow. I am very tired.

We’re Up Kinda

Saturday, the Planet had an electrical fire that caused an explosion knocking out power to their data center. Since the Planet is the largest hosting company in the US, a lot was affected by this. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 9,000 servers and ours being one of them. We were down all night Saturday and all day Sunday and just came back online sometime this morning. I am glad to be back and I apologize for any inconvience this may have caused any of you.

We are now back up, but the site seems to be running a tad slow now and I am in the process of trying to figure that out.

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Chris’ New Toy! What’s it for?

I can not confirm or deny any information on what the purpose of this new toy is, but I can just say that I have been waiting for a week for this bad boy!

What’s it for? Who knows…

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Mobilitysite Wants You!

The time has come to offer a chance to our community to help out.

• Do you want a six figure salary, 2 weeks of vacation, health club membership, parking deck access, 401k with 100% company matched contributions, and full medical and dental insurance?
• Do you want to browse the net for the coolest new mobile devices to share with the world?
• Do you want to have an opportunity to test some of the coolest devices and accessories in the world?
• Are you looking for something you can do from anywhere in the world in you pajamas if you want?

Well, me too! This job doesn’t have all this. but we still want you! We can only offer you the last 3 bullet items.

We are currently seeking more geeks that love Mobile Devices and like to share thoughts, opinions, tips and info, and generally help keep the community informed about breaking news about devices, services, software, etc.

If you are interested in seeing learning more about what we are looking for, go here and shoot us a line. Make sure to tell us about yourself and your background. Also let me know why you’d like to join the team.

Having trouble viewing Mobilitysite?

There was a problem over the weekend with DNS on our server. I believe I can pass the buck and blame it on the hosting company, but still it affects us all.

If you are catching this via RSS and you can’t bring up the site or the site seems to have missing images and style sheets, you should flush your local machines DNS to resolve. (or just wait it out)

To do this, bring up a dos prompt (in Vista, type CMD in the search box). Type in “ipconfig \flushdns” That’s it, that should clear you up.