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- January 15, 2007
Academic Procrastination 2006
January 15, 2007Read moreI came across Fumbling Toward Geekdom while checking my referrer logs, and found this great personal review of anti-procrastination techniques that the author, an academic with the handle “StyleyGeek”, had herself tried in 2006. In short: what worked, what didn’t, with many interesting links to tricks like:
- The Invisibility Cloak
- Unscheduling
- Contingency Management.
Intriguing! There’s also a link in this followup post describing an idea called rebooting your day, culled from a list of programmer productivity tips. It’s awesome:
As a last resort, reboot your day. This is something I do not just with work, but any time a day is going so incredibly badly it just can’t be saved. Turn off the lights and take a quick nap. 20 minutes is best. When you get up, take a shower, make a small breakfast, and just go through your morning routine as if it were the first time. Try to forget anything prior even happened.
Through Fumbling Toward Geekdom, I found another link to Jim Gibbon’s 5 Productivity Tips of 2006, which lists still more techniques I haven’t tried. Sweet!
- January 14, 2007
New Hampshire Ruby on Rails
January 14, 2007Read moreI was just chatting with Scott at ZenLinuxNH, and he reminded me that a New Hampshire Ruby on Rails user group meeting is coming up this Tuesday, January 16, over at UNH Durham. New Hampshire represent, yo!
- January 13, 2007
WordPress and Shared Hosting
January 13, 2007Read moreAfter I getting linked by several high-profile websites, the increased traffic has forced me to move twice. These notes describe my own experiences with WordPress and its needs. Individual WordPress installations vary in complexity, so your mileage may vary.
An Introduction to Blog Hosting Requirements
I was originally on Pair Networks, a reliable host that I’ve been with for almost 10 years. My website presence was largely for personal and business use, handling email only. This changed in late 2004, when I started my blog Better Living through New Media. Readership was up to about 100 people a day, through organic search and friends visiting, and Pair’s inexpensive Advanced web hosting plan was quite adequate. At $17.95/month, it is considerable more expensive than other popular WordPress hosts like DreamHost, BlueHost, A Small Orange and TextDrive, but it was the host I’ve been with for years. The WordPress developers have a list of webhosts also that you may want to look at.
When you are starting out, your needs will be pretty basic:
- Disk space, measured in megabytes (MB) or gigabytes (GB, which is 1000MB). The WordPress install only takes 3MB, and custom themes may add another megabyte. If you’re hosting lots of photos, podcasts, or videos, you’ll want more space, but just about any hosting plan will give you enough space. My entire WordPress install is about 500MB currently.
Bandwidth, measured in GB/month or TB/month (terabytes, which is 1000GB). For a site getting started, you’ll probably see less than 1GB a month of “normal” use. However, it’s the abnormal conditions that you’ll have to look out for.
Apache, MySQL, and PHP are the base requirements to run WordPress on a web server. In the case of Pair, the cheapest plan that includes PHP and MySQL is the plan I was using.
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p>The focus of this note is not installing WordPress, but on the traffic levels and server load issues that may drive you to move. For installation help, visit the WordPress Codex.
Getting Started: Low Levels of Traffic
As I’ve said, you can get started with just about anything. When I started blogging, I installed StatCounter and used this to monitor the amount of traffic I was getting. One nice thing about StatCounter is that is also gives you a nice way of exploring the patterns within the traffic, which gives you an idea of what people are looking at. The three fundamental stats of web traffic are pageviews, unique visitors, and referrals. A pageview is a page loaded with all the accompanying graphics and text. A unique visitor is a person who’s been looking at your pages. A referral is where the person “came from”, for example another website or perhaps a search engine.
While these stats are all interesting, the one that matters when it comes to choosing a hosting plan is pageviews. When I got started, I had a count of about 10-20 pages a day, which rose to around 100-200 pageviews over the next year. The site remained responsive and snappy…though the pageviews were a lot to me, the server handled this without any problem.
- January 12, 2007
The Healing Power of Water
January 12, 2007Read moreI turned 39 at the end of December, and with that came a whole host of aches and pains. I thought I was just imagining things because I was eyeing my impending 40s with some trepidation. But then the spasms began, starting with my left hand. My left shoulder joint starting feeling like it was seizing up, and then the right shoulder blade seemed to be grating itself into little pieces. My back was killing me, each vertebra crunching against each other like little disks of sand. These were pains I had never experienced before, and the usual three-day window it normally takes my body to bounce back from a strain had stretched well into 9 days, no improvement in sight. In fact, things seemed to be getting worse, which didn’t help my mood.
“So this is how it begins,” I thought gloomily. “Total body distintegration. Just in time for my 40s.” I mentallly flipped through the various exotic illnesses that could be afflicting me, my imagination fueled by the recent House marathon I had taken in over Christmas, none of them particularly amusing in this context. I feel into a dark mood, lacking energy and clarity. I stayed in the house for almost the entire week, talking to no one, pushing at projects in a vain attempt to keep my mind off the imminent physical collapse of my body.
- January 12, 2007
Investigative Design
January 12, 2007Read moreI’m sick, it’s 230AM, and I should not have woken up, but I was startled awake by a dreaming insight brought about by the events of this past week. And what a miserable week it’s been: I’ve been fighting off insomnia, my back and shoulder ache for no reason I can pinpoint, and I’ve been feeling very under the weather as I try to maintain momentum on projects. To top it all off, my recent server move has not gone as smoothly as planned; while the moving of the blog itself went smoothly, the addition of server administration has been unexpectedly unpleasant. The magnitude of this unpleasantness, however, is what has given me a tap on the shoulder with regards to my very nature as a designer.
