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.
I found your article while doing a search about sitemaps, so I figured I’d see what your take on it is.
I work at an agency that does small business websites, some as small as 5 or 6 pages, like an online brochure. I know sitemaps are useful, and help with SEO, but it’s part of our standard design to put text links to each page in the footer of each page. I think a sitemap page with 5 links on it is kind of silly, and a waste of space. Should we continue with the sitemaps or do the footer links suffice in those cases?
Thanks a ton!
I agree. Sitemaps are really useful when there is a lot of content in a web site – if you have a really simple site, it is probably overkill.
In the following video I answer this question and more importantly, I go into the broader issue of the importance of learning the code behind the web pages – HTML and CSS:
Trying to build websites without a good understanding of HTML and CSS is like petting your cat’s fur the wrong way … it’s a recipe for disaster!
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.
In the following video, I go over the two basic ways to insert video into your web pages:
1. Using a site like Youtube.
2. Embedding the videos directly using a Flash video player.
I also get into the video formats you can use to embed video in a website:
1. Flash FLV
2. H.264
3. Quicktime video
4. Windows WMV
For details and pro’s and con’s, watch the video:
As you probably noticed, I am using Youtube to deliver this video as part of an ongoing experiment. If you can’t see the video, it is probably because your work place is blocking Youtube. Let me know and I will release another copy of the video on the killersites.com servers.
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.
