So what are the cons? well unless you choose to upgrade to Vimeo Plus then you’ll be restricted to uploading only 500mb a month (not a problem in my case but might be a problem for others) standard members videos also get put into a “processing queue” that can take anywhere from 15 minutes to 2 hours+ (depending on the site traffic at the time of upload) however it’s worth noting that in my experience I’ve often found my videos are ready before the time given, maybe that’s because mine are so short? Unlike YouTube you can’t batch upload either.

Another con for iPhone and iPod Touch owners is that to date there is no app that plays Vimeo videos, though it’s something that Vimeo staff say they are keen to remedy in the future.

Overall I much prefer using Vimeo, it’s true that my sound clips won’t get the exposure and viewers they will on YouTube… but I’m not doing this to be popular, I post to this site because I want to.

Although Vimeo has been running for a couple of years now I suppose there is always that concern that its running on a finite amount of resources, it’s well known that YouTube with its billions of visitors and videos doesn’t make a profit, indeed Credit Suisse estimate that it makes an annual loss of $500m – though recent reports suggest that figure might be much less.

Hopefully Vimeo will survive, it has built up a nice community and the content on offer there is very good, the Plus package should help bolster running costs… but just incase I’ve also uploaded all of my sound clips to YouTube too!

<?php Code Here  ?>

And the answer was to try the following:

• Uninstall all plugins (No Joy!)
• Revert to default theme (No joy)
• Upload fresh theme (Implication being you haven’t messed with it – no joy)

When none of that worked the only solution was to trawl through all of our files until we found one with an empty line – fortunately the search started and stopped with the config file which we’d recently edited.

Then a few weeks later and yet again it was my config file and this time a google search showed I wasn’t alone in having this issue.

Once I could put down to bad editing, but twice seemed a bit much. I figured it must be my editor WebDesign by Rage Software, so I switched to Text Wrangler.

Then yesterday while installing a wordpress site for a friend I got the following php error during the installation: 

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/account/public_html/test-site/wp-config.php:153) in /home/account/public_html/test-site/wp-login.php on line 255

A quick Google later and yet again it seems that it’s an empty space in the config file, and yes i’ve used WebDesign again to edit it!

So I decide to compare the code (In Text Wrangler) from my affected file to that of a healthy one, and look what turns up:

Image grab of comments from healthy config file

That’s as you would expect, now look at what WebDesign did to it:

Image grab of comments from nasty file

Empty spaces everywhere! Either it’s adding them by default or I’ve ticked an option somewhere. From now on i’ll just have to use Text Wrangler as default – which is no hardship, I just wish I could set the text to soft wrap as default – I seem to have to enable it everytime I load up!

Everyone wants their website to be a success, but often it comes at a cost: increased hosting bills. Unless you run your own server, rent a server or use VPS chances are you’re on a shared hosting package. For most of us these are just great, you pay small sum of money for a modest amount of bandwidth and storage, but what happens when you get too big for your web hosting plan? Well most hosts will allow you to upgrade or add extra storage and bandwidth, usually that’s a system that works out very well… but is it the most cost effective?

The way shared hosting works is that your host buys/rents a server. They then “slice” that server into chunks of storage (Packages) and sell them on to clients. When a client needs more than their package allows the host has to charge extra because the client is using storage the host could sell on to a new customer… prices sometimes seem steep because it’s not a cost effective solution and ultimately the host can only sell on space if any exists on the server.

The introduction of Cloud Hosting from a range of hosting providers has changed things significantly. Cloud hosting benefits from utilising a number of servers to provide your hosting rather than just one, and because Cloud hosting is not based on one single server, extra storage may be added at a much lower price. For example 1GB of additional space a month on SiteHQ’s Cloud will only cost you £1.

For us at Scenography it was an obvious and easy choice, we were eating both bandwidth and storage fast and needed a cost effective solution. We’ve been on the Cloud for two weeks now and I have to say so far we are very happy with both the performance of the site, the hosting control panel and SiteHQ’s excellent support service. The migration was relatively painless, the only real difficulty we had was that our database was too large to be uploaded via phpMyAdmin, however SiteHQ were more than happy to do this for us. Although we’re paying roughly the same amount per annum we’re actually getting a much better service, with both more storage space and bandwidth as default than we had on our shared hosting plan, and of course if we should need to pay for additional resources they come at only a fraction of the price!

However it’s not all about storage space and bandwidth, another great benefit to be had from hosting your site on a Cloud is that you can use multiple platforms and technologies side by side: you can use Linux and Windows 2008 on the same site, as well as PHP, ASP, PERL, PYTHON.

If you’re running a site that’s getting big, or setting up a site that you expect to expand rapidly or perhaps you have a site that often gets sudden spikes in traffic then Cloud Hosting may well be the ideal solution for you.

There are a number of Hosts offering Cloud Hosting, though I can happily recommend SiteHQ with whom  i’ve hosted both a number personal and work sites off for over five years.

Cheaper Cloud Hosting

SiteHQ’s cloud hosting just got cheaper

Then I happened across the Tubular theme by Brian Gardner and available from Studiopress. Video embedding is dealt with very well, and it’s attractive out of the box, the code is nicely laid out and the css is easy to edit – all in all it’s a very nice package and as you would expect (you hope) from a premium wordpress theme there’s good support available in the support forums.

I know some people would reel at the thought of paying for a premium theme when there are so many good free themes out there… but I’m just happy to have something that works and if that means spending a little money so be it.

DSA Media made us a great gallery/album system for Scenography – The Theatre Design Website, it’s simplicity is genius compared to a Gallery2 installation it’s a real dream and so easy to maintain and use.

I’ve now converted my audio files to movie files and hosted them on Vimeo. They’re all in here and you may browse through them using the categories link on the right.

More about using Vimeo later!