FLASH: RE: Emma Bass Photographer http://www.emmabass.co.nz

[minty]

Marc Hoffman wrote:

>The MIME type for Flash is not set on your server. This may cause viewing 

>problems and even browser crashes. The photos look quite nice but I 

>wondered if they are interactive -- MIME not being set has all sorts of 

>unpredictable results including buttons not working right.


Mark, thanks very much for the info. We're in Australia, the ISP is in 

New Zealand, so phonecalls are a bit expensive. They've assured us that 

they know all about Flash and MIME types. Obviously wrong. I'll start 

barking at them... sigh. What the hell is about southern hemisphere ISPs 

and their moronic inability to set up their servers?


<begin Off Topic story>


On the same line, here's a (in retrospect) amusing conversation I had 

with another ISP. My client was yelling at me that their site wasn't 

working. I had contacted the ISP and they'd denied any possibility it 

could be their fault. Then this happened (names have been changed to 

protect the blindingly stupid).


UN-NAMED ISP rang.

It was another different guy, who I hadn't spoken too yet, asking me how 

to configure their server. 

I just got off the phone after an hour. 

Certain things were revealed:


1) He didn't know much about Flash, and said they didn't do much with it. 

When I mentioned this was the opposite of what SUPPORT PERSON A said, and 

that SUPPORT PERSON A had denied it could be a problem with the server, 

he said "Oh, that's a standard answer".


2) I spent a lot of the call time searching Microsoft & Macromedia sites 

for information on how to configure their particular server. I don't know 

why they don't know this, or why they couldn't search the web themselves 

(they are, after all, ISPs). I was reading the results down the phone, 

telling him what to type in to his server setup.


3) The setup still kept failing. This turned out to be because he kept 

force-quitting (End Task) the server and losing the preferences, rather 

than just quitting it.


4) At his request, I was also repeatedly testing the site from my end, 

each time he made a change. When I finally asked him why he couldn't test 

it, it turned out they didn't have Netscape Communicator (only IE). How 

do they offer tech support with only one browser (and only for PCs)? How 

do they check if their end users have legitimate problems?


5) He downloaded Communicator right near the end of our session, just to 

check it was working at his end too. The **18meg** download took about 30 

seconds. So I'm sitting here paying for every time I test the site, and 

he's got so much bandwidth it's as fast as a hard drive, and STILL they 

can't configure their own servers???


6) When I asked why they couldn't do a simple thing like MIME 

configuration, he said that they're not really an ISP, they just rent out 

space. I pointed out that this was like saying "Upload your pages. Our 

server doesn't show HTML, so nobody can see them, but they're on our 

server!". He agreed, and thought it was funny.


<end Off Topic story>



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