The Blog – Page 3

How I Did It

…picked a new web host, that is.

In recent comments, I got asked how I decided which web host to switch to once I gave up on Powweb. Truth is, it was not easy, and I very nearly re-upped with Powweb again, on the theory “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.” But over the last 4 years, Powweb has gone from being a great company to one that I barely tolerated. I couldn’t bring myself to give them the $$ for another year. So I switched.

Finding a new host was definitely not a one-time project. I collected information on and off over the course of many months, from a number of sources. Those include word-of-mouth reports from other web folks on 2 mailing lists (WWWAC and SF-WOW) and reports from friends (like Glen). That gave me some anecdotal evidence to start with. Another site that was helpful for giving feedback and potential hosting company names was the WebHosting Talk forums.

I tended to avoid the various websites that list or rate web hosts, since many of them gave the impression of being basically advertising vehicles for the hosting companies. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course, but I wanted user feedback more than anything else. Basic web hosting is so much of a commodity these days that I was more concerned with customer satisfaction within the price point I’d chosen (under $100 a year) than the nitty-gritty of exactly how many MBs of disk space or how many e-mail accounts I’d get with my service. I also gave bonus points to companies that had an actual customer forum, not just a one-way support desk.

I looked at Dreamhost, Laughing Squid, Media Temple, Lunarpages, 1 and 1, iPowerWeb, and a few others before deciding that A2 looked good. I did some more digging into A2, looking for reports of dissatisfied customers, outages, etc. Nothing bad jumped out at me. So I filed the information away.

As I said, this happened over the course of several months. Periodically I’d re-check, to see if opinion about a company was trending one way or another (increased outages, reports of slowness / overselling, etc). A2 still looked good.

Eventually, my old contract was about to run out, and it was time to push the button, one way or the other. So I took a deep breath and signed up with A2. And here I am.

That’s a little longwinded, but it’s the story of how I chose a new web host. I hope it helps someone.

Well, That Went Well

I’m settled in at the new web host now — who by the way, is A2 Hosting, and no, there’s no referral link on that URL.

So far it’s been great. The blog and the assorted other web files are all in place. I’ve cleaned out some old stuff I don’t need to keep on the server anymore. I’ve updated my robots.txt to reflect the new site layout. I have IMAP set up on my desktop and my laptop. Everything is running smoothly, DNS seems to have transitioned, and all is right with the world.

I’m even taking advantage of the fact that my new account has more bells & whistles to set up a side blog for recipies. It’s not quite done yet but when it is I’ll post a link.

What’s amazing is how much easier all this has been. When I first set up a website in 1996, this was very much a manual process, and you needed to either have direct access to the server and/or be very comfortable with a command line do stuff like set up a domain name, create a new web hosting account, or customize a website. Today, it’s nearly all web-based and so very painless. I love it. YAY for progress!

Site Move In Progress

I decided to give a new web host a try, and am in the process of switching servers. The site may be a bit flaky over the next 48-72 hours as the DNS changes propagate.

UPDATE: Testing the new site….

UPDATE #2: Looks like everything’s set. All in all, I’m really pleased with myself. I hit a few glitches, mostly related to file permissions and pathing, but I’ve gotten the blog, e-mail, file dump and archives all moved.

Please let me know if you find any broken stuff!

That Time Again

In 5 days, I’ll either need to be set up and running on a new webhost, or I’ll have to fork over the money to my current webhost for another year of hosting services.

It’s been a little busy lately, and I don’t really have the bandwidth to get set up on a new webhost. And frankly, although my current host can be a little slow when it comes to server response times, by and large I’ve been satisfied with the service this year.

Still, it would be nice to have an IMAP server for my email. And faster web server response would be good, too. Maybe an easier to use control panel.

I’ve gotten feedback from friends, and searched the web for reviews, and I do have one hosting company bookmarked. I might pull the trigger and switch. But right now the odds are high that come Oct 30 I’ll still be parked right where I am.

What Happened?

You might notice that the blog looks a bit different tonight.

Scott decided that it would be fun to go to the WordPress Upgrade Party that the inimitable Matt M held Wednesday night. I figured, it was a good time to see if I actually could port the blog over from Movable Type to WordPress. With 1220+ entries in the database, I was more than a little worried that trying to move them all would be hell and result in me having one massively screwed-up blog.

Well, I was wrong. The process was unbelievable pain free. Absolutely everything just worked. Amazing. I’m so used to tech stuff almost-but-not-quite working; for something to NOT screw up or require weird hacking to get it right felt…. wrong.

At any rate, I got the data ported over last night; tonight was the fun stuff. Find a theme, customize the sidebar, add a few plug-ins. The move is about 98% done, but if you catch any weirdness or bad links, please let me know. I still need to re-add the comment policy and a link to my old travel blog, plus decide what kind of spam filtering I’ll be doing. Akismet is up and running, but that may or may not be enough.

So…. after 4+ years, it’s farewell to Movable Type. I feel a little sad about it, but it’s time for a change.

Like it? Hate it? Let me know!

Update on the Spam Front

So, a few weeks ago, I was getting fed up with the comment spam onslaught, and tried using captcha technology to shut it down. And it worked, which was great, but it also caused some problems for some readers, which was not so great. Pissing off readers is not something I want to do, so I dropped the captcha and am trying some new back-end spam filters instead.

Although the new spam filters seem to be working well so far, I’m a bit bummed about the outcome, because the captcha plug-in I was using — reCaptcha — is a bit more than your average spam deflector:

ReCaptcha is a rather clever service using them to help digitize books scanned into the Internet Archive as well. It’s a project from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon.

The Internet Archive is home to over 200,000 scanned copies of classic books. Some of them are gorgeously crafted, like this children’s book, but fancy styling can make it difficult for computers to translate the books into an indexable digital text. Much like a Mechanical Turk application, ReCaptcha uses humans to translate images of scanned words that a computer couldn’t understand.

I’d like to implement ReCaptcha at work instead of the captcha currently in place on the blog there, but it’s busy as hell right now; I probably won’t be able to get to it for a few more weeks.