Running The Ladder is the company blog of Bainbridge Studios, a tiny runt of a design practice based in lovely Tacoma, WA.
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Website Launch: Vanessa Minnillo
Monday, January 28th, 2008 | Tom Carmony
We’re very pleased to announce the launch of the new official website for television personality Vanessa Minnillo. Ms. Minnillo, the former host of MTV’s TRL and a correspondent for Entertainment Tonight, has been working with Bainbridge Studios over the past year on developing a new online presence, which is now live. We’ll be working with Ms. Minnillo over the coming weeks and months on expanding the site and its content.
2008 Macworld Keynote: The Small Business Perspective
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 | Tom Carmony
Yet another Steve Jobs Macworld keynote presentation is in the books and, as would be expected, the Apple faithful are all abuzz. As a major fan (and consumer) of Apple’s products, Jobs’ annual keynote is very much the equivalent of Christmas morning for (Mac) geeks. Present company included.
At the moment, most of the buzz coming out of this morning’s presentation is surrounding the new MacBook Air, Apple’s almost-but-not-quite-ultra-portable notebook computer. Weighing in at less than three pounds and barely 3/4″ inch, it’s clearly one sexy machine, and one that I’m sure will sell like crazy.
Sitting back and digesting this year’s event, I’m focusing on today’s announcements from the perspective of a small business owner; what did Steve Jobs unveil that we can really incorporate into our workflow to help us work better, faster and more efficiently for our clients?
Dreamhost Accidentally Charges Their Entire User Base for Hosting Services That Weren’t Yet Due
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008 | Tom Carmony
Ouch. Glad I’m not in these guys shoes this morning.
The fine folks at Dreamhost, one of the better known (not always for the right reasons) low-cost shared hosting providers, managed to incorrectly bill all of their users for past-due web hosting services. For most of those users, though, their accounts weren’t past due. The billing happened because an automated billing system and one keystroke error: billing every as if today was 2008-12-31 (they intended to bill accounts that hadn’t paid up as of 2007-12-31).
You can see the fall out on their blog, the main posting for which currently has more than 1,000 comments (most of them none-too-happy).
This is just the latest in a long string of problems folks have experienced with Dreamhost’s shared-hosting services over the past couple years. We used to host our site and mail servers with Dreamhost, but their frequent outages (which always seemed to come at the most inopportune times) finally forced us to move on to our current hosts, MediaTemple (who do a spectacular job, btw!).
Script Leaked for Tomorrow’s Macworld Keynote?
Monday, January 14th, 2008 | Tom Carmony
As with any Apple rumor, take this one with a grain of salt, but there’s been a supposed leaked copy of the script for Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote address (scheduled for tomorrow morning) that’s been making its way around the internet since first popping up on Wikipedia Friday.
It’s a fairly intriguing read, and seems to fall in realistic spot as far as expectations – this would be a good, though not earth-shattering set of announcements (hey, we can’t have the introduction of something as big as the iPhone every year).
The only item on this list that really makes me doubt it’s authenticity is the “one more thing”, which would simply be the ability to download Y0uTube clips (yawn). There’s no way Jobs is ending any Macworld keynote with an announcement that lackluster.
Still a good read though, whether it turns out to be authentic or simply a well-written fake.
Network Solutions Now in the Business of Domain Name Squatting?
Sunday, January 13th, 2008 | Tom Carmony
A number of blogs in recent days have written up a rather disturbing practice implemented by Network Solutions, in which they apparently register domains that you search for (but don’t register) via their website. For instance, if I do a domain search for “ineedanewdomain.com” via the Network Solutions website, but decide not to register it at that time, I’ll no longer be able to purchase rights to that domain anywhere but Network Solutions. Any attempts to do so return a WHOIS search result listing “This Domain is available at NetworkSolutions.com” as the company name.
The practice is known as “front running”, scanning domain search records to find domains to purchase based on others having searched for them, and Network Solutions is claiming that what they’re doing is specifically designed to “protect customers from frontrunners.” By front running themselves. Of course, it makes perfect sense.