November 7, 2009

Update: Site migration, Nanowrimo, and Marble Maddness.

Migration Ok, so as the past two posts have hinted, Jackie and I have migrated most of our sites to a new host, Midphase. I compared 50+ packages to find a baseline for what we needed and rough cost. The initial round checked out Disk Space, Monthly Traffic, Uptime SLA, Setup Fee, Price / month, SSH access, OS, MySQL databases, Dedicated IP addresses. From there we narrowed it down to a dozen or so packages by eliminating overly expensive packages, bizarre limitations, required domain transfers, etc.

October 30, 2009

Moved.

So the new move went well; LE is next up I suppose.

October 30, 2009

migrating hosts

moving from unicron to our new host; using this site as a test. will be up sporadically. Update: this is on the new host; testing updates

October 16, 2009

How to Fail at SEO

Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your website easier for people to find via search engines. There are two ways to go about this- designing your site in a way that maximizes the right traffic to your site, and trying to trick google into sending ANY traffic to your site. There are some scum sucking bottom feeders out there who do this- Not only does it destroy the usefulness of search engines (like spam does to email), but it will often get you blacklisted and banned from sites like google for bad behavior.

October 10, 2009

-21 days till NaNoWriMo

Why am I writing this? Because I’m procrastinating. I’m stuck. I’m not even writing the book yet, I’m just coming up with the plot line. Perhaps sleeping on it will help. I can’t even write this without stopping every 5 words. Hopefully November will go smoother.

October 8, 2009

Stupid OCD

Just for the record, I WAS finished with the first draft. Honest. I wrote the rough draft for NaNoWriMo last year, chopped off two sections, rewrote the entire thing and was going to call it good. I just had a small list of things I needed to rework- polish how I discuss ziggy’s adopted mother, mention the king’s son, make Ziggy’s cousin and aunt more antagonistic, etc. There are 21 changes that I wanted to make for this book before I distributed the draft.

September 7, 2009

TAoZS:TR First Draft Nearly Complete

I’m currently on Ch 6 of 7 in the first draft of The AutoBiography of Ziggy Swift: The Rise. Anyone feel like volunteering? Check out the Poll on the side and let me know. You can email morgajel at my gmail address for details if you’re interested. My goal is to have this wrapped up for November so I can start the second book. When December rolls around, I’ll go back to implementing the suggestions people gave me on the first book.

August 18, 2009

The battle begins…

Time for a different battle- Ian’s online. Rather than be one of those moron parents who think it’s everyone elses job to protect my kid online, I’m gonna whitelist the sites he can visit, hence I gotta start working on a list of what sites are acceptable. Here’s what I got so far… http://pbskids.org/ http://www.infostuff.com/kids/a.htm http://www.fisher-price.com/fp.aspx?st=2601&e=gamesByAge&mcat=game_toddler&site=us http://schools-wikipedia.org/ http://www.funbrain.com/ Any other suggestions?

August 9, 2009

Relocating

So our host for the past few years is shutting down the service we’re using, so our sites are looking for a new home. I’ll be moving the lower traffic sites back to my server for now, and looking for offsite hosting for literaryescapism. Let me know if you find anything broken on the site. Thanks vp for the past few years of service.

July 26, 2009

Development is War.

So my mind operates on analogies/similes/metaphors, and I often find it difficult to explain concepts to people without a proper analogy. Today I came across a great one that I’d like to share. While I’m using developers as an example, it also applies to DBAs and most of IT- it’s just more pronounced in the dev world since there’s usually so many of them. Development is war. It’s a never-ending series of fast-paced, multi-fronted episodes that take place in multiple theaters.