After being in the Wilderness for a couple days, coming back isn’t the easiest thing to do. You need to re-adjust to your fast pace life, breath crappy air again, and catch up on all that is going on in the world.
To help me adjust a little quicker, I’m going to post a couple articles I’m hoping to read a little later this weekend. Feel free to read along if anything catches your fancy but this is mostly a reminder for myself.
posted on December 31, 2003| 10:40 AM EST
It’s the day after Christmas and that means the end of the year is not far behind. This past year has been pretty eventful for me and overall a good one.
For starters - I got married this past August to a wonderful lady that now goes by the name Jodi Schaap. She’s been a great companion and although we have some tough times, we have a lot more great times that allow us to keep moving forward.
I’m still working at the Holland Sentinel after so many other people have been laid off. That in & of itself is amazing. The fact that someone is paying me to do something I love is hard to find these days. Now that I’ve recently gotten my own work area, things are even better.
Throughout this year I’ve put together some great projects with the help of my co-workers.
Some being:
On a personal level - I’ve had the chance to work with various people in creating their online presence or simple consulting work.
I’ve also increased my education through random college classes and hundreds of personal study hours. I’m slowly understanding the world around me and becoming more and more intreged with the things I don’t know.
I also bought a house on the North side of Holland, Michigan and have had a great time learning to be a handy man - although I have to admin, I’m far from where many others are.
So 2003 has been a great year and I can’t think of much to complain about. Here’s to next year and for it to be just as good if not better for not only myself, but to you all.
posted on December 26, 2003| 2:11 PM EST
For the past few years I’ve been using Hurricane Electric for all my hosting. This includes not only my client projects but my personal site here. For those past couple years they’ve been amazing and I never had a problem suggesting their services to those in a search.
Lately (past couple months), they’ve been having problems with their servers being down randomly and the past week they were down a total of 4 times. Of course I notice exactly when they’re down (within 10 minutes) because I’m always online at work and my Entourage is checking my mail every 10 minutes. If my server goes down - my email icon begins to freak out and lets me know something is wrong and it’s not able to check mail somewhere.
Searching
So with all these server crashes as of late, it’s brought me back into the market of searching for another hosting company. I’ve been hunting around for the past week pretty intensely but haven’t been able to find exactly what I need. I usually end up having problems when I want the ability to create multiple MySQL databases or the ability to telnet and SSH into the server. On top of that - I also want the ability to have multiple domains and sub-domains on the same account.
Possible Options
A couple thoughts that I’ve come up with have been to, (1) make my own server. I could easily get pieces together or if worse came to worse, just buy a computer to do the job. The other option would be to (2) get a dedicated hosting package with another company and just have them take care of everything.
With my first option - I would love to do this but have doubts on my Linux administration. Right now I just know the basics and have trouble when trying to install various, needed items on Linux. I know I could just learn it but right now my time is really being spent on CSS, PHP & MySQL. I need to become a lot better in those things before I can justify the study time on Linux.
Of course there are people I can ask for help and this might just be an option. I could even pay someone to maintain the box for like couple bucks or something like that.
The other problem with this is the uptime. I would solely be responsible for the server being up and would need to work out a deal with my broadband provider in order to use my bandwidth for web hosting. So if I ever moved or if the power ever went out for a couple days (again), I would be pretty screwed.
My other option - Option two seems a little nicer and I might possible go that route. The price would be a little more a month than I’d like to spend but I could grab one or two other guys to help with the costs. With this option, I would have a whole box to myself and not have to worry about the above details.
However, as nice as it seems, there is the attraction of hosting my own website and being completely in charge of everything. I would have the ability to learn a lot more and it could only help in my computer self-education.
Now What???
So here I sit and don’t quite know what exactly to do. Both options are very attractive but one doesn’t seems to just yell - “DO THIS ONE!”.
I’ll be putting some specs together and comparing the two options side-be-side to see which system would be better. I’m definitely open to options but most of the people that read my website aren’t as tech savvy and would rather I talked on a more personal level - talking about what I did today and how I felt about those things. Possibly at a later time though, right now I have these things on my mind and it helps to write them out.
So if you have read this far and do have some suggestions or things I might have overlooked - let me know.
Update
Before I start getting to many emails and comments from various people. I should probably state what exactly I’m looking for. If you or your company can offer these things to me - I would love to hear from you.
What I need is:
- PHP
- Perl
- Python (not required)
- MySQL (ability to create multiple DBs)
- SSI
- Unix/Linux server (no windows crap)
- Full Shell Account
- Full Unix Development Environment
- crontab
- Apache
- 600MB or more
- Direct Access Via telnet
- Direct Access Via ssh
- 15+ email accounts
- Web-based email
- Control Panel (if possible)
- sub domains available
- multiple domains (if possible)
- ect - but you get the idea
posted on December 24, 2003| 9:35 AM EST
As I’ve eluded to before - I’m real particular about how things on my computer are organized and I’m always trying to find a better solution. Lately I’ve started to notice the size of my email folder (78MB) and was surprised and how much email it would take to accumulate that much space.
I took a look at my folders (shown below) and thought to myself - “That doesn’t look like that much!”. I thought that until I began to open all of those folders up and began to realize the amazing amount of information that has been passed over to my inbox these past 2 years while working at the Sentinel.
I’m not one of those people that just keeps emails around because there is a funny joke that I may one day be able to use or scared of one day needing to reply to someone and need their message somewhere on my machine in order to click “REPLY”.
I’m the type of guy that deletes everything that I don’t absolutely need. My inbox never has more than 5 emails in it. As soon as I get a message(s) I respond, save message if necessary, and/or delete it an then delete my deleted folder.
That said - it’s very important that I do keep some emails for various reasons. The main reason I might keep an email is - They’re a client and I need to keep records of exactly what is said so they can’t come back later and accuse me of something. You won’t believe how many times a client will tell me they said one thing only to show them the actual email they sent to prove they indeed never said anything of the such.
However, with all this - I thought it would be fun to open up my email organization to all of you to look over. Let me know what you think and if there is a better way of organizing my information.
On another note:
I would also like to see how you guys organize your emails so take a snapshot of your email folders and either post them somewhere and link to it in the comments or email them to me and I’ll post them online.
posted on December 12, 2003| 12:57 PM EST
75 years ago Lida Rogers, founder of Tulip Time, pursued a dream to beautify the community. In the fall of 1928, a quarter of a million tulips were planted, and in May 1929, Tulip Time officially began. Now in 2004 we will mark the 75th anniversary of the Tulip Time Festival.
I’m also happy to announce the re-launch of tuliptime.com which went live the other day. After two months of strategic planning, various design stages, programming and pulling my hair out I was finally given the go ahead to push the site live earlier this week.
The site is done completely in XHTML 1.0 and CSS without the use of tables and other nasty code that had plagued their site in earlier days. The ecommerce areas are sadly another story and produce undesired code and reprogramming the backend system isn’t an option (as much as I would love to get in there and fresh’ in things up).
The design of the site is a mix of 2 designers, myself and the Tulip Time Festival, Inc. board of directors. As I have pointed out above, this is version 1.0 and many new things are to come. Next year we have plans to do much cleaner design that will immensely improve usability and accessibility of the site.
So take a look around and let me know what you think. It’s still a work in progress and new areas will be added throughout the next couple weeks but overall, this is what Tulip Time Festival Inc. was looking for and I’m happy to have worked along side them to develop such a wonderful product.
posted on | 10:11 AM EST
