Entries Tagged 'internet' ↓
March 14th, 2008 — internet, tech
I could say growing pains in reference to, say, the life of this website, but really the most recent change is that I have, essentially, downgraded my web hosting, so “growing” doesn’t really seem appropriate. Moving pains would also work, but then you would lose the irony.
Hosting with DreamHostfor the past some-odd years has been fine. They have decent starting prices for the first year, competitive prices after, and they offer ridiculous amounts of both storage and bandwidth. More, in fact, than anyone should ever need on a shared host. They’re inconsistent though, when it comes to uptime, though I hear rumors that this is pretty much on a server- by server-basis, so maybe I just got unlucky.
I’ve been investigating DreamHost alternatives for a long time now, with some good leads now and again. I used Precision Effect when I created the lissat.org website (one that, sadly, I’ve never developed), and was happy with their speed and support, though at $6 a month for their smallest package, they still weren’t inexpensive.
After more recent browsing, I finally moved this site over to NearlyFreeSpeech.Net, which is a hosting service with a neat idea. It’s essentially a pay-for-what-you-use service: you charge your account with moneys, and then pay as you go, starting at $1 for the first GB of bandwidth and then getting cheaper per GB as/if your site becomes more popular. They don’t have any one-click installs, no user-friendly services. They have a knowledgeable user base and a well-used forum for when you run into trouble (as I did quite a few times getting WordPress installed). Pricewise, I expect $10 will get me through a few months, at least. Speedwise, so far, I find it much improved over DreamHost. And no, NearlyFreeSpeech.Net does not have an affiliate program, so I’m not trying to sell you anything. Fact is, the all-manual approach to site management is probably more than most people want to deal with, so NFS isn’t for everyone.
I’m in the process of moving La Casa Comics over to A Small Orange. That was also a swinging deal, $20 for 14 months of hosting in their “Tiny” package, which will most likely be enough for us, obscure as we are. I’m still waiting for the DNS to propagate (after a freak accident where it propagated immediately, and much sooner than I thought it would, and I have to switch it BACK over to DreamHost to ftp some files out before the switch). Once I get things set up, I’ll report back. But so far so good.
I moved all of the domains over to name.com, which has been nice and easy so far, and cheaper than anywhere else (currently under cost, actually, for new domains). I always heard that domain registrars should be separate from hosting services, but I’d always been too lazy to change it until now. It’s nice to know, though, that is for some reason the hosting company really decides to suck, there’s no chance of losing my domains on top of everything else.
Alternative hosting sites that I looked at (of note) include: Laughing Squid and Bluehost. Laughing Squid is neat because it’s based out of San Francisco and claims to serve the artist community particularly. Still, even if you use their “starving artist” discount, it’s $8 per month, so I thought I’d hold off and try some cheaper plans first. Also, you can see their sticker in the photo above. Bluehost seems like a big, but good, solid web hosting company, with lots of space and bandwidth and a free domain for $7 per month, but still a little too pricey for me, who is trying to save ALL his pennies for the time being. What can I say, I’m cheap yo!
If you’re interested in hosting and you have no idea what you’re doing, find someone like DreamHost who has nice one-click installs on a variety of applications (they really are easy for first-time host users). Bluehost evidently has a WordPress one-click install, though I’m not sure what else. If, however, you want cheap and complicated, so far I’m pretty happy with both NFS and ASO. I’ll be sure to let you know if anything changes. In the meantime, things should be much more stable around here (and eventually over at la casa); that is, if you even noticed anything going on in the first place.
So that’s my story. What about you? Do you have a great host? Who with and why are they awesome? I’m always on the lookout for the best deal. On the other side of the coin, who is completely worth avoiding?
March 8th, 2008 — internet, photo, wordpress
photo credit: billaday
Amy over at informing MUVEs is trying out a WP plugin called Photo Dropper, and it looked like it might simplify my inclusion of photos on ye olde blog, so I thought I’d give it a try as well. Honestly, I’m not sure what I think of it. Up until now, my current process for posting photos has been to: a.) Find a photo on Flickr, I try to use my own photos whenever possible; b.) download the photo to my desktop; c.) resize the photo so that WP can display it at actual size; d.) upload the photo using WP’s file upload function; e.) insert the photo into my post at full size with a link to the photo creator.
It’s not the most straightforward process, but it has the benefit of hosting the photos on my site, so that I’ll know as long as the blog is here then the photos will be here too. Photo Dropper turns my five-step process into a two-step process: a.) enter something into the search bar; b.) insert a picture using a given size. Simpler, sure, but the photo remains hosted over at Flickr, and if the user ever deletes it, or their pro account expires, or for any other reason the link degrades, my post is all of a sudden minus its visual element. In certain cases this could really damage the function of the post, assuming the content revolved around the photo itself.
Also, and feel free to call me Web 1.0 for this, I still like going to my content. I like reading blogs on their native sites when possible, instead of aggregating them, likewise webcomics, and I like looking at Flickr photos on Flickr. Surely I’m not the only one?
Time will tell if I stick with Photo Dropper, but right now I’m thinking I probably won’t. It’s just not that tough to open a new tab over to Flickr and find a quick image, a process which has a lot of benefits. Since I’m on the topic, though, I thought I’d mention some of the WP plugins and Firefox add-ons that I do like and use.
I tend to be a minimalist when it comes to WordPress. I abhor the WYSIWYG editor, and I try to keep my plugins to a minimum. That said, I find the following essential:
I’m a Firefox minimalist too, but I couldn’t live without FireFTP for my file transfers, and I find ColorZilla super useful from time to time.
Are there any that I’m missing? What WordPress plugins / Firefox add-ons can you simply not live without?
March 7th, 2008 — humor, internet
Crap, and all this time …
From Stuff White People Like:
#81 Graduate School: Tho’ thank goodness I’m attaining a practical degree! #75 Threatening to Move to Canada: Does it count as “threatening” if I actually did move? #72 Study Abroad: Does Canada count as “abroad”? What about that three months I spent in France? *le sigh* #68 Michel Gondry: Guilty as charged. #65 Co-Ed Sports: Well yeah, that’s how I met my fiance!
Also guilty of liking: Recycling, Bicycles, Natural Medicine, Juno (the movie), Irony, Vintage, Public Radio, Plays, Breakfast Places, The Daily Show, David Sedaris, Wine, Microbreweries, Tea, Wes Anderson Movies, Barack Obama, Organic Food, Farmer’s Markets, and Coffee.
That’s 24 of 84 things currently listed on the site. I guess I’m beyond hope at this point. Oh well, guess I’ll go drink some coffee and listen to This American Life, since it’s the weekend and I don’t have to go back to my graduate school classes in Canada until Monday.
February 15th, 2008 — internet, libraries, socialweb, work
I’ve reached the point, hurrah, where I get to start applying for jobs. And not just jobs, either. I get to start applying for careers; specifically, to begin my career. This is a magnificent thing, and I’m truly incapable of expressing just how exciting I find it. It’s like getting a baby elephant for your birthday. What, that’s never happened to you? Well, just imagine then. It’s got large, velvety Dumbo ears, a cute, short tri-foliated tail, three little spots that look like toenails on each foot, and a long, mischievous trunk that it uses to steal peanuts; also, it wants you to work from nine-to-five, teach people how to organize and use information effectively, and it has a nice benefits package.
It’s amazing.
I attended the Web 2.you conference today out at McGill, and while I’ll provide a write-up for it in full soon, one of the presentations got me thinking about the job application thing. Alright, so I was thinking about it beforehand, but it strengthened my need to have these thoughts. The presentation was on blogging: how to blog, why to blog, and to whom to blog.
Now, I’ve been blogging for a long time, so if blogging is something that libraries should start doing, I think that puts me in pretty good shape. On the other hand, I’ve been blogging for a long time and I’m applying for jobs and I have the easiest name in the world to google. It’s not that I’m ashamed of my blog. On the contrary, I have very strong feelings about this, my home on the interwebs, and my right to feel comfortable here. And besides, I don’t post anything objectionable, really. Maybe the occasional F-bomb. Plenty of things off-topic (whatever my “on” topic may be). Some personal stuff, some poetry, and lately, some music. I don’t know, I think that all these things, when put together, make me out to be a pretty well-rounded person. My problem is, what if someone I really want to work for googles me, comes here, and sees my post on say, The Mighty Boosh, and decides that because I find Old Gregg hilarious I’m obviously a poor candidate for their nifty if very serious position as Librarian X? Maybe they’re turned off by my usually pretty personal poetry, my aptitude for alliteration, or just the frivolity of this whole affair in general. Bam, nifty job gone. I wouldn’t even get to experience the dubious pleasure of being dooced.
I presented my dilemma at the end of the talk. Most of the people there were professionals, already working, so might have similar if not exactly the same problem. They could get dooced, but mostly I don’t think employers google their employees names on a regular basis all that often. And if they do, well, something has to come up to warrant the justification of firing a person, the pain of going through a rehiring process, and the risk that the new person may blog too. I’m not worried about getting fired for having a personal website that put poems and songs and stuff on; I feel justified in worrying that it could affect my being hired, though.
So what’s the solution? I’m not sure. I guess I could relax under the assumption that all librarians are amazing people and will really get a kick out of Old Gregg. Relaxing and assuming the best seems like a passive approach, though, and I don’t know if I want to put all my trust in it. At the same time, I don’t want to go through and turn select posts into “private” posts because, as I said before, I really do believe in the idea of a home on the web and of being comfortable in that home. Sure, I know anyone can come into my home, take a nap on the couch, raid the fridge, and pet my cat. I can invite them in, true, though I can’t keep them out, but I don’t want to, so I’m okay with that. They can’t move my furniture and there’s nothing worth stealing. The only bad thing they can do is come in and judge me; maybe I’ve hung the wrong art on the wall, or my living room isn’t feng shui, or my couch is too lumpy or my DVD collection sucks. I like my stuff. My home is for me, primarily, though other people can come in anytime and part of me hopes they think my art is cool and my couch is comfortable. The only time it matters if they don’t is if they can hire me, and they choose not to because the fact that I own and enjoy Sin City makes me a horrible person. I don’t feel like they should come into my home and judge me, but I guess that’s the nature of the beast, really.
So what to do? I feel hiding posts is a form of self-censorship, and I hate that idea. At the same time, are my ideologies worth not getting a job that I would really love and be amazing at? I’d like to trust in the better nature of an employer, and think that if they really find my blog that objectionable then maybe I’d rather not work for them anyway, but being a poor, way-in-debt soon-to-be librarian doesn’t really put me in a strong bargaining position in the first place (despite my amazing skills), and to be honest I’m not going to turn down a job on the moral standpoint that they don’t like my blog. That would just be silly of me. They have every right to not like my blog. Really.
So long as they hire me.
February 12th, 2008 — internet, news, socialweb
Everytime I blink it seems like Google takes over one more small part of the world. Maybe next weekend they’ll learn French?
Earlier this week, we started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling “knol”, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The tool is still in development and this is just the first phase of testing. For now, using it is by invitation only. But we wanted to share with everyone the basic premises and goals behind this project.
Sound familiar? Yeah, Google is out to kill Wikipedia. Kill ‘em dead.
(via Steve)
