Warning - AMD Live! Media Vault; Mediamax powered by Streamload

A quick entry to warn anyone who's thinking of using the AMD Live! Media Vault - DO NOT!!

I signed up for an initial free 25GB of storage, but I needed greater capacity to get hold of a friend's wedding photos so I decided to pay for an upgrade for a small monthly fee. I figured I could pay for a month then cancel it after I'd got the photos but how wrong I was! Once signed up, the site doesn't offer any proper way to cancel the service apart from emails which they have refused to acknowledge in any way.

So I've ended up being charged since May for a service I no longer want & can't cancel. I'm currently urging my credit card company to pursue them for what I consider to be fraud (the card company, Co-Operative Bank, has been pretty tardy at doing so, but that's another story!).

Worryingly when the bank actually did stop one set of charges from Mediamax they simply changed the name to Streamload & continued to bill me for the service! It’s still ongoing, obviously it will end at some point, I’ll get a new credit card, but I wanted to get out there what a racket this service is.

Avoid at all costs!

Chiwis Community Server Gallery Manager

I had a problem with bulk upload of my photographs to Community Server but it was sorted by using Chiwis CS Gallery Manager. This application provides a nice UI to upload as many photos as you like with the ability to give each one a title & comments as it goes. The only tricky bit I found was finding the web service (asmx) that needs to be FTPed to the hosting webserver.

Occasionally an error occurred but the photo on which it occurred was still uploaded & I could just start the process again for those photos remaining in the queue. Wonderful.

Next up is to port my whole webspace to get greater capacity for further album uploads.

Blog Mark III

Here we go again with the latest incarnation of the blog, this time due to a change of platform. It & the rest of my site now use Community Server, a free content management system for websites.

The reason for the change is that I had spent a lot of time creating a photo application but the more time I spent on it the more limited it seemed to be, or the more I wanted it to do. Then I was introduced to Community Server & it made sense to get my site using that because it does pretty much everything I had in mind for the photos & for the site as a whole. In particular I especially wanted viewers of my photos to be able to comment on them, so I might actually get some feedback & even some laughs from them.

As ever the site is a work in progress but I hope to master Community Server & stick with it for quite a while.

Update 03/12/07 - Block Mark III (b)

I've managed to successfully move the site, so this is the latest incarnation of the blog & with much the same content to start with. I'm now getting more space for less cash so I hope to realise more of the potential that Community Server can give me particularly because I had been holding off uploading more content until I moved the site as planned. I also hope to add a couple of mini-apps of my own to flesh out the site as a whole.