Hurrah!

Hurrah! It looks like our website problem with Internet Explorer 6 is solved. We're really sorry for the inconvenience some of you suffered.

We also discovered that the form page (i.e. with the form for corresponding with us) was refreshing itself every minute. Some of you may have had the frustrating experience of seeing your message disappear before you sent it. Again, our sincere apologies. It has been fixed.

Once we're really sure that the new website design is working across all browsers, we'll spruce up our product pages (i.e. the ones that have tables).

Internet Explorer 6

More website woes ... We have discovered that users of Internet Explorer version 6 cannot view our website properly. The page layout breaks down completely - and yet in other browsers, including IE7, there is no problem at all. Unfortunately, nearly 20% of visitors to our site use IE6 so we must try to find a solution. (The short term solution, of course, is for everybody to upgrade to IE7 - using the free download on Microsoft's site - or switch to the excellent Mozilla Firefox.)

In case you know a lot about this kind of thing, apparently the "css" files are faultless so the problem may lie with some "javascript" in the "html" pages. Hmm, you all understood that, I hope?

Revamp of Website

We changed the appearance of the toyrentalclub.com front page a couple of months back. The new design includes handy tabs along the top, a navigation bar that changes colour when your cursor hovers over an option, a neater right hand column and slightly larger text.

We liked the revamped design and wanted to extend it to all the other webpages. However, since our webmaster is a family member rather than a paid professional, we have had to wait.

In the past week he has managed to redesign about a dozen more pages. Now all that remains is to upgrade the many pages that contain tables listing our products. Not a straightforward matter, apparently, but he's "working on it" ...

Website Woes

Our website disappeared this afternoon and is still offline. Really really frustrating as we are so reliant on it: that's how clients can see what's in stock and place their orders.

According to our hosting service (here in Singapore), their servers have been hit by a "distributed denial-of-service" (DDOS) attack. Sounds scary, huh? Basically, the internet server gets swamped with useless traffic until it drowns. The motives vary but usually someone is trying to prevent an Internet site or service from functioning. It seems unlikely that we are the target since hundreds of sites are down. (By the way, major sites such as Amazon, Yahoo and eBay have been shut down by this kind of attack in the past - so we're in good company!)

Postscript: In theory, our hosting service got us back online about 8 hours later but due to the wait time for "DNS propagation" it was mid-morning of the next day before the site actually became usable. It seems all ISPs are vulnerable to this kind of attack but clearly we'll have to investigate whether there is any form of backup we can employ in future.