Customer downloads area currently offline
UPDATE: All sites now back online and working well.
Unfortunately @Rackspace are having network issues with cloud servers and because our load balancer is in their cloud we currently have no secure.myjoomla.com or fix.myjoomla.com services available.
Rackspace say they are working on the problem, we however are making dns changes to bypass the loadbalancer but these might take some time to kick in depending on your dns caching.
Sorry about the downtime, you will be able to download shortly.
Thanks to @uptimerobot for the alert notifications – an excellent service as always
Hard drive failure on my workstation
Today I’m suffering from a total hard drive failure on my main PC. Lucky I always have backups, but I now need to reinstall the operating system from scratch and get up to speed again.
Please bear with me as I do this, I’ll attempt to catch up as soon as I can.
Server Move Complete – All Systems Online
Just a quick note to say that all our sites are now running on the new hardware and are all live and working 
Out Of The Office Notification
Just a quick note to let customers and all site visitors know that Monday 1st and Tuesday 2nd December I’ll be away from my desk and unavailable to reply to emails as I am on a quick trip to London. I am flying in on Monday morning, having a two hour meeting on Tuesday and then flying right out again Tuesday night.
This is all part of a short term contract with a very well known high street bank (and their offshore offices) which will take me out of my office for the next three weeks while I conduct a physical audit for them over multiple island sites. I will however be working evenings to reply to emails and assist customers, but please be patient with me
During this time you can still purchase items from our site and receive instant download at myJoomla.com – we have invested heavily over the years in automating our business processes and are confident that they will work for you – if you have any questions, installation issues or need any help then please feel free to contact me at any time – I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.
I’ll be working on the next version of Joomla Forms over the next three weeks too – and hope to get a brand new release done before Christmas – maybe two new releases by then…
Downtime and XML Entity issues
Thanks for all the emails and messages – WE WERE NOT HACKED
Last night our server started experiencing a problem with apache and the number of connections grew and grew until the server could no longer cope. Our technicians at ThePlanet.com restarted the services while we were sleeping and now all is well.
However, we have some lessons to learn from this.
Some customers, when accessing our extensions admin consoles on their sites, experienced this error:
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Fatal error: XML Error : Undeclared entity warning at line 37 in administrator/components/com_kb/bfXML.php on line 141
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The reason for this: Our components, when invoked through your admin console retrieve the XML file at http://www.phil-taylor.com/versions.php in order to evaluate if an update or serious security issue alert is available for this extension. At the moment if our site is offline you will experience the above error.
Clearly this is unacceptable and so we will be taking steps in the next releases to capture this error and to bypass the version check if the XML file is unavailable. You can currently do this by editing /plugins/system/blueflame/bfTweaks.php and toggling the true/false on the _SKIP_UPDATE_CHECK define line.