Monthly Archives: May 2014

Bad iTunes Ux and How to Submit a Podcast to iTunes

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I find iTunes Ux to be horrible. My guess it is largely driven by people that think the useful web isn’t cool enough so lets break all the things that work in order to be different. Or maybe there is some other reason for the horrible Ux that I don’t understand.

iTunes doesn’t use urls which are super user friendly. And even when urls are lamely named they can be useful.

Trying to figure our using the UI of iTunes how to submit a podcast was impossible. using the iTunes help found nothing for submit podcast? Using Google to overcome Apple’s lame help found web pages on Apple telling you what to do. It read like 1990 UI navigation by text. Go here click here, then click, here then click here. How idiotic. On top of being idiotic and outdated it didn’t work the places to click didn’t exist.

With using 1997 technology (way before really but wasn’t so common long before 1997) just have

itunes.com/podcasts/submit

No help needed. Even if someone goes to help just give that clickable url and done. But no, in 2014 Apple still can’t do that.

Finally I found another url

https://buy.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZFinance.woa/wa/publishPodcast

Super lame and unreadable but guess what clicking it works, unlike the various useless Apple webpages on clicking here and then clicking there and then clicking the next place which doesn’t exist.

Related: NASA You Have a Problem (point hair boss level idiotic Ux at NASA) Goldbergian Flash Fits Rube Goldberg Web Site – 1 in 7 new phones which are returned have “nothing wrong” with them (other than super bad usability) – Customer Focus and Internet Travel Search (usability done well by Hipmunk) – Making Life Difficult for Customers – Poor Web Site User Experience (Ux) for stock market data – NSF super lame usability failure

Turn It Off and On Again

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I had a WordPress blog lose the database connection. As I tried to troubleshoot it I rapidly got to the point of thinking that maybe just rebooting the server would fix things – since no changes had been made that should cause the database connection to be lost. But also I figured I couldn’t be so lucky that such a simple thing would work.

I tried to log into the database using the cli and it was failing. MySQL was still running – according to top. I have automated security updates setup for the VPS server running Ubuntu. My thought now is those updates somehow messed things up to the extent the server database connections somehow wasn’t working. I sure hoped that was the case.

I rebooted and hoped.

After a bit I was able to see that it was working.

When I went to reboot I noticed I hadn’t rebooted in a long time. My guess is I might have the automated security updates setup wrong on this server (maybe it is installing more than just the security updates), I’ll check. I have not had this problem before with other servers, obviously breaking a database in this way would cause lots of problems on production machines so I tend to think it is more likely I messed something up than this is a likely outcome when using automated security updates (but such things are possible which is why I think places with full time system admins and important servers rely on manual updates with professionals watching everything to be sure nothing obvious breaks).

My feeling is the longer you go with not rebooting the server the more likely some issues are to crop up (but also every reboot is more like to result in some broken thing, right then, than doing nothing so it is a tradeoff). And I could be wrong in that feeling, it is just what I guess without much evidence to support my guess.

Anyway I was very happy turning it off and on again worked. Honestly I went ahead and updated the server before I rebooted, but my guess is just turning it off and on again would have worked.

Related: Making Sure You Don’t Run Out of Space on Your VPS – Basic MySQL Performance Monitoring – WordPress error: Image could not be processed. Please go back and try again.