Servint VPS

You can get web site hosting dirt cheap these days. Most of these hosting companies just offer you plain old shared hosting. Your account can host mutiple sites, you can FTP in to upload your pages, and you’re on the same server as thousands of other sites.

VPS (Virtual Private Server)

If you’re a bit nerdier like me, though, you’ll probably have fun running your own VPS. This is a whole step up from shared hosting – you basically run your own server.

The only catch is that your virtual “server” is sharing the same hardware with a few other virtual “servers”. This virtualisation allows you to run a fully self-contained server, while not paying for using all the hardware.

When I say you get a server, I mean that with a VPS you can:

• Log in to your Linux server through the command line
• Install any program you like to customise the site. Need a special image manipulation library for PHP, just install it.
• Fully configure Apache, MySQL through config files, log files, custom timeouts – whatever you want.
• Guaranteed RAM and CPU cycles for a fast site load.
• Install SVN and forget about FTPing files.

What I went for

I’m not a Linux command line pro. Actually, I felt a bit lost there at the beginning. Instead of going for a blank canvas approach such as Slicehost, I opted for Servint which is a fully managed VPS solution. This means that if something goes wrong, if I mess up Linux or Apache, their 24/7 support guys will fix it.

Try out Servint if you want more than just shared hosting. All my sites are hosted on my VPS, the busient being IrishGaelicTranslator.com with over 500,000 page views per month. The page you’re reading right now was served by that VPS. It takes a bit of server juice to serve all those dynamic pages, especially at peak times.

Get hosted with Servint VPS hosting!

Film a cat playing the piano, and write an concerto to accompany it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeoT66v4EHg&

1. Create a Page and call it “Home”. This is your default home page.
2. Create a Page and call it “Blog”. This will show in /blog/.
3. In Settings -> Reading, choose to show “Home” as the static page for Pages, and “Blog” as the static page for Posts.
4. In Settings -> Permalinks, change the “Common” rule to /blog/%postname%.
5. Ta da! Your pages will be created as mysite.com/page/ and your blog posts will appear inmysite.com/blog/post/.

After 7 years of using handmade PHP pages on LearnIrishGaelic.com, I finally moved the site over to a Wordpress installation.

What this means is that I have one of the most mature web application at my fingertips. Adding a new page no longer means creating a new PHP page, and worrying about how to update my navigation menus.

What’s better, I read Brian Yerkes writing about how to use Wordpress both as a CMS and Blog. This means that the main part of your site can be static pages, while Wordpress still handles /blog/ as a blogging application. Follow the settings above to get your own CMS powered by Wordpress, while having a blog section.

Handing your hard-earned cash to to an online vendor can be hard to decide on, especially if it’s a small site you’re not familiar with. I’m always highly suspect of a site promising to ship something out to me.

So I was thinking about how to optimise the visitor’s process on LearnIrishGaelic.com where I sell some language learning software.

I’ve made a small change online. Instead of guessing when you’ll receive your order (”within 10 days”), I’ve added “Next dispatch date” and “Your order will be delivered by…” date to the shipping information.

Hopefully just another small bit of information that will help you decide to splash out on a learn-at-home Irish language product

Yesterday was the first day of counting in Ireland’s 2009 Local and European elections.

There will always be some spike in traffic to a news website around a big event such as an election. These are the most crucial times for a news site.

This is why a news site’s server should be prepared for unexpected traffic spikes. Unfortunately, Newstalk.ie (a good radio station) is down, presumably because of people trying to get up to date on the latest election news.

Tip to Newstalk: beef up your server and check your Apache settings

At the time of writing, Google have released the very first Chrome-branded browser on Linux (in my case Ubuntu).

To install Google Chrome on Ubuntu, follow this download information link.

As the Chromium blog states:

… whatever you do, please DON’T DOWNLOAD THEM!

From what I understand, this current release of Google Chrome on Ubuntu is basically a branded version of the Chromium browser which is in pre-alpha stage for the Linux platform.

Go ahead and install it for the fun of it. You won’t even have a Flash plugin for the browser yet, but it’s being constantly updated.

Technologizer asked about the newly announced Google Wave whether the application is bloatware.

Screenshots show a service [...] less an example of Google-esque minimalism and more like a Microsoft app that’s been through a few versions and is shoehorning stuff in.

Good point. Google Wave is a complicated application.

Wave has “Spelly” which is a context-sensitive spell checker based on existing text found in Google index of the web.

Wave lets you collaboratively edit in real time, which was the most difficult feature for them to develop.

It’s trying to do many things. The idea of Wave was probably interesting in the beginning, but as development went one they realised they needed to solve more problems.

But Google Wave will get simpler by necessity. It has “amazing potential” according to its authors, but so does Twitter. While building an Irish dictionary application I realised just how important it is to keep thing simple, stupid.

Update: Storm Alert blog reviews Wave’s internal architecture, and points to some major concerns of over complexity of the design of the system which will have to be worked on to help the maintainability of the overall system.

After upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty, upon startup I kept getting the following error:

Enter password for default keyring to unlock

The application ‘NetworkManager Applet’ (/usr/bin/nm-applet) wants access to the default keyring, but it is locked.

The solution

1. Right-click on the wireless applet in the task bar
2. Find your wireless connection, and hit Edit.
3. Check the option “Available to all users”.

Thanks to tentwelveight for uncovering the answer.

There, I’ve admitted it. Whether it was the overly-played Rickrolling, Lolcats, Angry BBQs or even just other unkown gems.

Haha. And that’s just it. Probably the best thing about these memes are their immaturity.

Keyboard cat is the latest one that gets the giggles.

And there’s always Slap Chop! Slap you troubles away with Slap Chop.

At least after spending years later in Windows, I’ve converted to Ubuntu Linux, currently running the slick version 9.04.

My current Ubuntu desktop.

Since Windows 3.1, I’ve been a Windows boy. I’ve dabbled around in Linux and Solaris during college, but my daily life always revolved around Windows.

After trying to *ahem* install Vista on my XP desktop and failing, I started looking to Ubuntu. It’s a “distribution” of Linux with customisations that pull together the out-of-the-box Linux components.

Ubuntu is completely free, and even more importantly for me, it’s always being updated. As long as the Ubuntu distribution has momentum behind it, my system is always going to be up-to-date with the latest operating system. Stick with XP and you’re already stuck with 5+ year old technology. Get with the times!

The up-hill battle

It was not easy. Actually, it was a struggle that turned me back several times before getting it right.

• I had to fiddle with configuration files to get my oldish ATI X800 graphics card working.
• It was tough trying to figure out how to dual-boot the system with XP, and share files between them. (I settled on FAT32, but that’s not perfect, I’ll slowly migrate to Ubuntu’s preferred file system).
• The fonts used by Gnome are a bit “big” for my liking, compared to what I’m used to on Windows.
• I couldn’t get my torrents working (finally worked with Deluge).
• I couldn’t run Photoshop or Lightroom (that’s still an XP thing), and I’m not used to Linux’s Gimp image editing suite. Nor am I comfortable yet dealing with my raw Canon photos.
• It’s confusing not having a “C:” drive. I’m still not sorted with this in my head, and it took some text file configuration to see all the partitions. Also, I had some partition permissions issues.
• I like working with Notepad++ and Filezilla. It’s fine now, I use gEdit and Filezilla.  (And I could have installed Notepad++ in Ubuntu using Wine).
• I had set up TortoiseSVN for my SVN’d web site source files. Using Subversion from the command line is easy, but you have to learn it.
• My PhD thesis files are in Word 2007 and Endnote (bibliography) formats (still boot up XP for this).
• Wifi wouldn’t work on my Laptop with last year’s Linux, but that was updated later.
• Still not sure about installing software separately from Synaptic package manager.

Now to enjoy Ubuntu

But now it’s sorted, and I’m liking it! And it doesn’t look like I’ll be turning back. Both my desktop and laptop are now Ubuntu’d.

• My system will always be updated, for free.
• It’s pretty snappy.
• My web development is based around Subversion these days, and Ubuntu plays nicely. I’ll blog more about this later.
• Full music player, and VLC for videos.
• Easy installation through the software manager.
• Nice dark theme “New Wave”.
• Chromium (open source Chrome) hopeully coming soon.
• I use uShare to wirelessly stream videos to my Philips Streamium SLM5500 set-top box, so I can watch my videos straigh on my TV.