Time Lapse

Losing a dedicated server for 3 days due to bad service is no joke and even though the problem was unusual it still took too long to fix.

In my brain it would have been good if this whole process could have been captured by time lapse photography (this is lame, I know) so that the film of the sequence could have been condensed into an amusing video format, a byte-size chunk, if you will, for all the 3-minute-pop-song attention spans out there.

Outside of my brain, the reality would have been better served by taking a sturdy time lapse camera, along with a will to exact vengeful, indiscriminate, furious damage, to the programmed heads of the helpless drones that form the building blocks of multi-level telephone support desk systems for large companies.

But I had other stuff to do and my prolonged spitting rage was soon tempered by the frustrated, learned-helplessness of a human individual trying to interact with a system. Chalk and cheese, or maybe a 'category mistake'?

Bad website hosting

'Issue first reported to FastHosts 11 April 2009 at 15:22 BST

Issue unresolved for 3 days, 19 hours and 41 minutes'

Callisti is disgruntled and angry at the poor level of service from Fasthosts with the dedicated server hosting. The reason for choosing this hosting provider was to maximise the chance of 99.9% uptime. Right now we've got 100% downtime as the server is powered down.

All was well until Easter Saturday when a complete loss of service and connection to the network was experienced. Unbelievably this is still the case and engineers are still reported to be looking at the problem.



The current diagnosis is hardware failure of a network card which is taking 3 days to replace. Many Callisti customers are experiencing loss of service for their websites and email and we can only apologise for this.

Fasthosts have acknowledged that the problem is at their end but the speed at which they are addressing the problem is lamentable.

Google Ad variations

Callisti has been optimising adword account ad variations for time lapse photography suppliers, Lobster Pictures, and is noticing an almost immediate improvement in CTR (Click through rate) and a reduction in CPC (Cost per click).

The best way to do this is to target the ad to the most relevant content, which usually means pages on the website aside from the homepage. By using the Ad structure you can match the search string closer to the Ad title and related the keywords in the ad copy to the landing page.

This is logical as the keyword relevance in the ad should match the keywords of the landing page. Otherwise you're not targeting your Ads very accurately!

Page Rank update

Thought it was an April Fool, but noticed after some optimisation work that Google had re-cached the Callisti pages and the SEO website is now PR4. G'night...

The future of Scottish music

Sometimes a sweet fusion has to be shared...



This could be the way to unite the Scottish shortbread tin history niche with a more international music flavour and bring it in to the new decade.

Jimmy Shand vs 50 Cent indeed

Badger Surveys in Dumbartonshire

Stuart Spray Wildlife Consultancy is carrying out badger surveys in Dumbartonshire this weather. They are also concentrating bat surveys in Glasgow, and bat surveys in Perthshire.

This is in line with SEO Geo-targeting updates to the website content. Throughout the year the survey work will be carried out in different areas of the UK so the content and news needs to be updated to reflect this.

If we stick to this strategy we can measure how effective this is and how quick the response is with search engines and resulting traffic.

Planting potatoes

Using a different IP address, even on the same server, is a way of creating external links to a website. We thought we'd try this with planting potatoes - a way of siphoning off specific content into a mini-website and then linking back to a client's ecommerce site where relevant products can be bought.

Chitting potatoes - now there's a phrase I never thought I'd use.