A few weeks ago, nobody who wasn’t living literally in the shadow of a volcano was giving much thought to the impact that a volcanic eruption could have on their lives. Of course, that was before the volcano-nobody-could-pronounce erupted in Iceland, shutting down air traffic in Europe for several days. Would-be travelers were faced with a choice between sitting tight in London (or wherever) and reading a book or sightseeing, or else hopping a train to race south and attempt to fly out of a different airport. For most travelers, it was a relatively minor inconvenience and perhaps a bit of unplanned expense. For the airlines, it would certainly have had a much bigger impact.

I’ve heard good things about Zenni Optical, but what a bad time for the Googlebot to attempt to crawl the site. If your business depends on website uptime, you need to have a complete duplicate of the site on a separate server and a separate development environment (sometimes these can be the same, so two copies instead of three). The whole point is to minimize downtime during maintenance windows. Bad luck for Zenni. (Click to enlarge, etc.)

Busiess Week Article: Web Design Horrors: the most egregious of these involve your domain being “held hostage” by a developer who registered the domain in their own name rather than their client’s. As an ISP owner and domain reseller, I saw this too often, and we sometimes had to intervene to help “victims” recover their domains.