I’m moving a few things around this weekend on the Internets. For one thing, this blog will hopefully be on the new server by the end of Sunday.
This means some things might not look right. I probably won’t be posting too much, either.
Hooray for deadlines that come from actually doing things.
It’s been a fun ride. I love your company’s willingness to be open, with your dreamhoststatus.com page and your awesome blog. However, I can’t take the recent flurry of downtimes, which are just causing me quite a bit of pain.
I’ve been using a service called Montastic to track down time. In the past two months, my site has been down not once, not twice, but eight times (and even, two and three times on the same day).
This is from my gmail account. I get emails from Montastic when the server goes down. And when I do get the email, I go check instantly.
Some of these were hiccups, with it possibly being Montastic’s fault. Though, often they were huge downtimes that really hit my traffic during peak hours. By the way, my web server name was erebus, and I can’t even find postings about it in the past two months on the dreamhost status page.
I can’t really trust Dreamhost like I did back in the days when my web presence wasn’t very important to me. I think it’s still a great starter web host, hiding a lot of the menial tasks of setting up a web server… it’s just that I feel as though I need to move up to something a little bit more… expensive?
I’m thinking Media Temple. I might just go all out and start using Slicehost as my main blog and dev server. I might throw in some Amazon S3 for making my site even faster. Anyone have any ideas?
Edit: Looks like I may possibly be sticking with Dreamhost. I went and played around with MediaTemple for a night, and I didn’t like what I saw. The UI isn’t very clean, as much as Dreamhost was. Maybe I should talk to Dreamhost directly to get a response on these down times…
I love WordPress. I love the guy who started it, and am love with in the network that has been created at WordPress.com. (Note: WordPress.com is the network, WordPress.org is the place to download the source of the WordPress bloggin software) Automattic, the company founded by Matt, creates not only the blogging platform but also Akismet, the tried-and-true workhorse of the Internet for catching comment spam… which I’m glad for its existence.
Maybe it’s the fact that Automattic took off around the time I had my PHP blog site going… or something. I don’t know. But really, I support his (or their, I don’t know enough about the history of the company… I should find that out) push towards having the platform be open source (and I don’t like how Six Apart took this long to take the jump).
I really don’t want to code for the blog, other than the template. I think WordPress has matured enough for me to move this into the Clouds, so to speak.
What I mean by that is I won’t have to manually update the php code myself. Dreamhost does have a very nice button I can click on now and then, but WordPress.com would push out the updates on me, regardless if I like it or not. I wouldn’t have to even think about what version number we’re at (unless I have a problem… but I trust them).
But more importantly, I’ll be hooked into the network of the bloggers that are on the system. Yes, I have technorati and feeds, but this is just another way to get my stuff out there.
Sweet. Now to pick a time and date to do the move. Maybe I’ll blog that experience, too.
One huge HUGE con is I can’t use Markdown for adding markup to the pages. This is a huge HUGE problem. I don’t know if I can go back to typing out HTML anymore.
Alas, more to think about…
I don’t know the exact number of hours spent on HanMeta today. I gotta keep better track of the hours spent. I mean, I read my feeds during my breaks, and do some other work related to finding a full time job. Regardless, It’s just been a very very hectic day.
I’ll try to be a little bit more detailed so that others that are trying to set up Rails, Subversion, and Capistrano won’t have to go through the craziness that ensued today. Just need to figure out Capistrano… followed by lots of tweaking.
Yes. I’m so happy the app is getting started. I set a goal for this Sunday night (a little leeway) to have all this process stuff out of the way. Which mean I need to:
Oh, and as a bonus, I want to run through the tutorial in the Rails book again before the end of the week. That way, I’ll be completely prepared for the n00bage that’s going to start next week.
I really hope that this doesn’t turn out like the last time I set out to do this. Lesson from that failure: Do something. It’s so hard to get things rolling.
I’ve been dying to put something up here. Something eloquent. Something earth-shattering. I mean, if it took this kid like a month to post something, it’s bound to be nuggets of diamond-encrusted platinum, right?
But I come before you, a humble man: I’ve got really nothing to say. And since I’ve got nothing to say (at least… I’m not lying to you), I think this is the best time to return to the “blogosphere”.
I’m not trying to come up with excuses as to why this blog has been just wasting away (no… it’s not WoW or Ruby or other life changing… events…), but I think it’s good to kinda throw out some possibilities as to why this might have happened.
I think it’s safe to say this: I was slapped on the wrist for violating an NDA with Yahoo! during the interview process. I’m still not 100% sure what I did to break it (I’m about 90% sure). Whatever it was, I think it was settled. I complied and removed the offending posts. I really should have requested a hard copy of that NDA… but I really don’t care too much about Yahoo! at this point. A recent article on Ars Technica covered a story on something like this.
At least I didn’t pull a “Josh Kim” after getting a job. Whew.
Anyway, all that insanity made me question something about this blog: Who am I writing for? Yes, it is indeed, partially for me… but what about everyone else?
I just haven’t really realized how public my blog is. I mean… it’s just as easy to get to my site as it is to get to facebook or google. This is the beauty of the Internet, and one of the many reasons why I got into web development in the first place. (However, seeing how Dreamhost has been acting up in the last couple of weeks… I’m considering switching hosts.)
So what is to become of JoshKim.org?
I think I’m going to keep it just as open as before… but with more sobriety (and no drinking jokes here, please). I think I just need to keep straight that this blog, while frequent most by the loyalist of fans (i.e., friends I know in real life), can and will be visited by people I’ve never met before. (That “How to Hack Xanga, Kinda” is one of the few examples as to why this statement is… so very true.)
In general, I need to start posting less personal posts. I have a lot of “Lessons Learned” posts, but I need to make sure those are just vague enough so that the people that were involved in the incident would know, and only those people.
Link blog? I think I should start it up someday… I have too many links to share with the world. I should at least start with my starred items in Google Reader.
Ruby. Rails. I’ve started going through the books. And methodically, might I add. I forgot how much I learn by doing. I also forgot how much I love to learn by doing. Yikes.
Purpose. Without purpose… why even do it? Follow the examples…
Why do all my posts end up with some kind of universal life lesson? Oh, right. Metacognition.
Ugh.
Chicago, Illinois. Madison, Wisconsin. Fun.
I didn’t know this, but there’s a tiny movement against having “www” subdomain in links. Just visit no www to read up on some of the reasons why.
>Succinctly, use of the www subdomain is redundant and time consuming to communicate. The internet, media, and society are all better off without it.
The reason why the site was “down” for the better part was yesterday was that I installed this: no-www wordpress plugin. The silly mistake I committed was that I forgot when I set up JoshKim.org, I had asked for any request to “joshkim.org” to be sent to “www.joshkim.org”.
If you visited either one of those links, you would bounce back and forth… and back and forth… and back and forth… until the browser gave up on the request. I don’t know about you, but I got this strange looking error that wasn’t a 404 or anything I’ve seen before.
I realized this error after finding out that there wasn’t any server outage reports on the Dreamhost Status Page.
Just a heads up to those that might want to follow with the rest of the Internet in making it a “www”-less world… and so that those people won’t make the same mistake as I did.