Blogging

Typepad upgraded their systems last night, and a bunch of new themes are out there. I treid one. I like the color palette but I have issues with how it keeps the middle (the posts) of the site so small. The other template I had kept the middle fluid so I could make it bigger if I made the browser window bigger. This one doesn’t allow that. I am going to keep it around for a few days and see if it grows on me, and others.

It is funny when a provider I use does maintenance and the first thing I think of is the time of day they did the work and the impact on their user base! I read their notice and was surprised they brought down the system at 5PM (8PM EST) on a friday. That is work that I would normally do at 1AM EST. It was just funny that I thought of that. I am too involved in technical operations I guess:)

I also uploaded all my Camera Phone Images from June.

I admit that sometimes I cannot make up my mind. Last month I got a static IP address for my cable modem at home. I figured I would host my own mail/ftp/web server like I did in years past. It was a great idea. I know more than I did back then and even then I hosted stuff. My problem is I don’t have time to deal with building and tweaking a server at home. I have tried. The machine I got to use as a server has been sitting idle wasting electricity.

Over the past week or so I have been doing research on web hosting providers again. I see all these really cheap providers but none of them have all the features that I want. That is what lead me to want to self host anyway. For whatever reason I got sidetracked on the Typepad site before I logged in one day and saw the Moveabletype hosting providers list. I checked them out to see how much it would cost for a web provider that would give me Moveabletype blog also. Turns out some of them were nice and full featured web providers. They weren’t cheap compared to a godaddy.com or hostmysite.com, but they offered me options that I wanted. IMAP mail is key for me. Also the ability to host multiple domains or sub domains without paying a ton more. Also a decent amount of storage space was needed. I ended up choosing Media Temple. For like $10/month I got 2 gigs of storage, IMAP mail, and extra domains. $6/month more gets me Moveabletype. I still have months left on my Typepad subscription but I want to try out the hosted Moveabletype. If I don’t like it I can always stick with Typepad and still use Media Temple as a hosting provider.

I am not going to say anything good or bad about the new provider for a while. I have found several providers that seemed awesome until I found the one feature that they said they had and didn’t (godaddy and IMAP) or some other issue that caused me to cancel within my 30 day free period. This is after I do my research. This provider seems to have all that I need. As I write this entry my site is uploading onto the new server. I need to read up a bit more on Moveabletype to see how I can customize it. I like the way my Typepad blog looks now, so I want to try and emulate it as much as possible.

This News.com article talks about what Google is doing to stop people from comment spamming blog’s in order to boost their own sites listings on Google. Looks like they will offer an HTML tag that will stop spydering links on a site. That way if you run a site you can tell google when your links stop, and when comment type links start. This is perfect for comment spam on blogs like this one.

The article mentions that Six Apart (the very nice operators of the Typepad service I use) will immediately implement this new tag on all their hosted blogs. Does that mean that people will stop spamming my comments? If spamming my comments doesn’t do anything for a persons google ranking, I hope it will stop. I know in the short term it wont stop, but I can wish can’t I?

I currently host my blog at Typepad. I have been very happy so far except for one technical limitation (i will go into that later). I host my regular (old) site and photo album site on my friend Miguel’s server. The problem is due to space constraints a few months back I don’t have the full site up there. My email is hosted elsewhere (also free).

My issue is I am at the mercy of others because of the “free” status of my service. I am looking at cheap hosting options. I have been thinking about it for a month or so. I am not sure if what I gain is worth $5-8 a month. Granted that is cheap, but free is cheaper. Because of how Typepad had me setup my domain name it also poses some issues. Most web hosting companies require you (or REALLY like it if you) use their DNS servers so they can setup all the records for your account properly. Because of Typepad requiring me to point an A record for www.Scott.ac to it prevents me from using my main domain I use (i use Scott.ac for everything including mail) to any web hosting company. I can get mail configured but it requires non standard setup from any provider. I would have to select another of my domains to use as the primary domain name. That is not so bad, but any “non-standard” setup’s worry me. Anything that requires custom configuration is asking for things to go wrong.

Jayson and I had the idea of splitting a server over at godaddy.com. For $40 a month (20 per person) you get a decent sounding setup. Granted it is a virtual server, but I have no issues with that. I am pushing VMWare with my company so why would I have issues with VMWare for my use. I am still pondering my options.

Knowing myself as I do I will dither a while longer and then make a spur of the moment decision that will not take into account most of the research I have done over the past month or so!

Last weekend I spent some time cleaning up this site. I went back and broke out allot of entries into more categories than work and personal. I also cleaned up the allow comments or not to allow comments options on my older posts. Now I hope not to get stupid comments from casinos or other spam comments.

By now I have had my Typepad site up for a little over 2 months. I think I am happy with how the site came out. I have refined the layout enough that I won’t tinker with it all the time anymore. The only think I don’t like is the color pallet. The original one I had I liked better. The problem is I cannot remember how I got to that color scheme. These are the stupid things I fret over in my free time:)

I once again tweaked the design of this site. I hated that the body of my posts were so narrow an area. I have a 20″ flat screen at home and when I look at the site it was always so narrow. The border was huge. I found a way to make it “fluid” so it scales right on the resolution a person uses. I love the Typepad templates regarding site design. I also changed the name of the site. See a future post as to why. I am trying to be more creative with the name. Probably not working, but at least I made an effort.