This is just going to be a quick blog post, because I am still busy getting killersites.com up and running properly after an emergency server move I had to make.
The short story …
I had been using the same hosting company for many years and generally with not too many issues. But in the last year, things started to go downhill fast. The server was very slow (overloaded) and it went down way too often.
The last straw that broke my weak nerd-back, was a complete shutdown of my account by some pencil-necked twit who decided that killersites.com had too much traffic … so this no-nothing nerd suspended the account!
… You have to understand, I had been with these guys for 5-6 years, I’ve spoken to the founder/owner on several occasions and they used killersites.com as a feather in their cap:
‘… we proudly host killersites.com.’
So this unannounced shut down of the entire site was shall we say, vexing.
When it get’s that bad, it’s time to leave fast!
A quick threat of legal action got the site back up quickly, but I was warned killersites.com had too much traffic and I had to move it. So, I moved it to our own dedicated servers right away … within hours.
So why did I not change over to our own dedicated server years ago?
Answer: Configuration.
Killersites.com has been around for about 13 years now and it has a lot of old legacy stuff floating around. Specifically, we are talking about old Perl scripts and a couple of Java based web applications.
… Once you get these sort of things working, you’d best leave them alone. That hassle combined with my general laziness caused me to keep killersites.com sitting on the old server, even when some early evidence of trouble started to brew. You can’t underestimate laziness!
Continued trouble …
So as I write, I have still to get the old Java forum up and running again and the Perl based directory is not fully operational. The nice thing though, is that all the PHP based applications:
– WordPress blogs
– Newsletter script
– PHP based forum (to replace the Java created forum)
… migrated easily and are working fine. Once again, no hassles with PHP and I highly recommend you learn PHP as a web designer.
Once and a while I mention things that fall outside the realms of web design and web programming; I only do so when I feel it is something important to point out.
The Giant Housing Scam
This time around, it is the giant fraud put forth by the US financial players … this whole housing bubble was a giant ponzi scheme and a new giant ponzi scheme is being engineered now. Check out this Rolling Stone article – it sums up what happened and what is gearing up to happen over the next several years.
This is interesting news for web designers as it seems Safari is even getting traction in the Windows world:
Apple said Friday that more than 11 million copies of its new Safari 4 web browser have been downloaded in the first three days of its release, including more than six million downloads by users of Microsoft’s Windows operating systems.
Some interesting points about the new Safari 4:
– It uses the Nitro JavaScript engine that executes Javascript code several times faster than IE 8 or Firefox 3.
– Safari (according to Apple) renders HTML three times faster than Firefox 3 or IE 8.
And for Mac users, this is an interesting point:
With the release of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard this September, Safari will run as a 64-bit application, boosting the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine by up to 50 percent, Apple claims.
Besides the speed improvements, Safari 4 has some really cool features like the Topsites feature that basically gives you a large thumbnail preview of recently viewed web pages.
This is just a quick warning that the trial download of Premiere CS4 is buggy .. at best.
Install Process Craps Out
I tried to install it on my Mac several times and I kept getting an error message that did not help. In the end, after rebooting several times and following all trouble shooting instructions that Adobe provides .. it would not install.
… Talk about lousy software!
Seriously, when a company can’t even make their install process work … you have to wonder! I should also point out that (after some digging with Google) that I am not the only one who has had this problem. That said, the trial worked fine on Windows XP.
Premiere’s Trial Version is Crippled!
The not so nice thing (due to licensing issues,) is that the trial version cannot work with several common video file types like h.264! That meant that I could not test how well Premiere would handle editing the file types I deal with daily. Sucks.
Oh well, I guess I will have to take a look at Final Cut.
These are part of my new growing collection of Javascript video tutorials that aim to teach total beginners how to read and write practical Javascript.
I would like to point out that I’ve invested in making the sound for these videos as clear as possible … so let me know what you think.
Before MySpace, Facebook and Twitter there was once GeoCities. Yes back in the 90’s, GeoCities was going to take over the world and change the face of the Web. So Yahoo spent a bunch of cash ($3 billion) and bought up that very ‘valuable’ piece of Web real estate.
…. Hmmm this kinda reminds me of the Facebook and Twitter hoopla.
Geocities is closing its’ doors
After a decade of spuddering about, it seems that Yahoo has finally figured out that there is no money in having a bunch of lame web sites filled with lame content:
Yahoo Inc. said Thursday that it would shut down its GeoCities free Web-hosting service after paying about $3 billion for the unit in 1999.
GeoCities isn’t accepting new accounts and will close later this year, Yahoo said. GeoCities, Yahoo’s second-biggest acquisition behind Broadcast.com Inc., lets users design personal websites to show off photos, promote local clubs or publicize business services.
The recent Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN Twitter race opened my eyes to the fact that celebrities are jumping all over Twitter. Being a curious nerd who is sometimes (mildly) interested in the next Internet fad (anyone remember Geocities or Friendster?) .. and so I decided to finally take a quick look at Twitter.
… Also, being a former student of psychology, I was curious as to why celebrities seem to be falling over themselves to get on the Twitter bandwagon?
So first, what is Twitter?
In a nutshell, Twitter is a virtual-home for narcissist and people who have no lives. The narcissist send out the messages and the people who have no lives, wait around to learn what fascinating things the narcissist chooses to write about in 40 characters or less.
Some of you may know that killersites.com was originally founded by David Siegel to support his best selling book on web design: Creating Killer Web Sites.
What made this book important, was that it taught the web design community that design principles should be used in web design. Believe me, in those days, that was ground breaking!
So what is Dave up to these days?
Besides flying around the world taking pictures of orchids, David has been involved with something called the Semantic Web. I won’t go into details about it here, but suffice it to say that David is a strong advocate and he believes that it will shape the future of not only the Internet, but perhaps the way we do business and live.
That all said, the reason for this post is to help David get out the word that he is open to the possibility of helping to run Apple computers. Yes, he does have big ambitions … but why not? Apple is about forward thinking and innovation and David has a track record of both.
You can read more about his ideas on this personal web site: David Siegal
I just wanted to first wish everyone a merry Christmas and a happy holidays.
I haven’t been posting new blog entries … but I have an excuse! I’ve been busy working on putting up a brand new forum.
The old Java based forum was becoming a little too dated in terms of it’s features and the way it worked overall. It was showing its’ age.
Why not just update the forum software?
Believe me, I tried several times but for reasons I was not easily able to figure out, the new version of the forum just did not want to run on the live server. I could get it to work on my local development/testing machine … but not live.
So I then contacted the people who built the old forum and asked for assistance. To my surprise, they wanted 10-15 hrs of billable time to install their own forum software!
… I was willing to pay to have them do it, but 10-15 hrs to install a forum!! That’s nuts! Another classic example of Java’s tendency to over-engineer everything.
Sometimes it just makes sense to move on …
So I decided to start researching for a new forum given all the problems I was having, given that the forum had serious flaws to begin with and finally, when the people who built the thing want 10hrs+ to install it … it’s time to get the hell out!
Anyway, I researched and researched and finally found something that I liked. It is fast, modern, built with PHP and only takes 3 minutes to install … even if you never used it before!
I invite you to check it out: the new web designers forum at killersites.com.
