I get no less than 2 or 3 requests a week from friends asking what my recommendation is for them to setup their own personal website or blog to showcase their family photos or post entries to the web. I usually point them to a few sites like Blogger or Wordpress.org, that I have some experience with and know that they are quality online products. Both of these sites are free and pretty easy to deploy and maintain. With these free blog solutions there are a few considerations that I like to point out.
Domain Names
When you sign up for these free blog type websites you typically get a domain name that can be easy for others to forget. For instance, http://cottonrohrscheib.blogspot.com. Plus, I am not for sure that there are any guarantees that this will always be your domain name. I would think that these services would reserve the right to force name changes on their users with very little if any notice at all.
When you utilize a company like Pleth to develop and host your blog or personal website we usually will build the site on a domain that you (the client) owns. For example: http://www.cottonrohrscheib.com. This domain belongs to me and will always belong to me. I will likely never change this domain name since I have a history on this domain and that’s where all of my friends have me bookmarked. This is probably the biggest difference between having a firm like Pleth build your blog or going with one of these free services and should be considered carefully.
Plugins and Technical Assistance
With free blog solutions out there you typically have access to a wealth of Plugins that can be deployed and maintained with little or no technical knowledge. With that being said, there are still some Plugins out there, for wordpress especially, that require various levels of technical knowledge, sometimes php scripts have to be modified to work correctly with these Plugins. When you have your blog built by Pleth you have access to our developers to assist you in deploying Plugins and further extending your blog to add features like photo galleries, etc. Of course our developers charge an hourly fee for doing these updates, but at the end of the day this is a lot easier to justify than spending hours on a support forum or developers community looking for support and then still having to do your maintenance yourself.
These are just two of the things that I often bring up to my friends who ask me for suggestions prior to establishing their own personal website. I have nothing in the world against these free services, I think that they serve their purpose on the web and fill a void that was there a few years before they came upon the scene. At Pleth we typically service Small Business and Enterprise Level Development projects that consist of custom applications. With that being said that doesn’t mean that we don’t occasionally take on high level blog projects for political candidates, musicians, authors, etc., we even develop corporate blogs for our clients from time to time as add-ons to their existing web presence.
If you are serious about establishing a personal website or blog, please feel free to contact us regarding your project and we would be more than happy to discuss your project and give you a quote for developing your project.
One Programming Podcast that I subscribe to on my Zune is PHP Abstract. This podcast was put together by Matthew Turland and discussed Screen Scraping. This is kind of a “black art” but interesting nontheless. He discusses both Retrieval of Source Code using a function call and also a post call in PHP. He also goes into Authentication and Cookie Setting.
In this podcast Matthew recommends using the Web Developer Toolbar for Firefox to get form information, etc. If you are an active web developer and don’t already have this free plugin I recommend you get it, next to SEO Quake it’s probably one of my favorites as well and definitely handy if you are going to do a scrape.
He also discusses the second part to screen scraping which is data analysis. Since most pages don’t have well formed HTML he offers up some suggestions for page markup (text normalization) with PHPTidy.
As I mentioned earlier this is sometimes considered “Black Hat” but we do have at least one client I know of that utilizes this methodology by coldfusion for legitimate reasons. This is very cool technology that I haven’t actually utilized outside of this personal website before. My photo gallery is actually a scrape of my PIcasa Public Photo Gallery, albeit it was written by someone else and contributed open source it required some heavy manipulation to work in my blog since it is heavily customized.
PHP Abstract Episode 22: Screen Scraping
In earlier Blog Posts I have discussed the differences between Forums, or Message Boards, and their popular counterpart, the Blog. I had a client today send a note asking us if we had a document that explained what a forum was and how it operated so they could in turn release this document to their membership prior to the soft launch of their Forum we constructed for them. I took a few minutes and put together this explanation, thought it might be useful for someone else down the road. It’s real basic and intended to be that way…
What is a Forum?
A forum is an online discussion board consisting of threads, or comments, posted by registered members in response to topics or other comments posted by other registered members. Forums are an excellent tool to engage conversations between a group of people on a variety of topics.
Who Uses a Forum?
Anyone wishing to participate in a forum needs to register their information online. A moderator or administrator will typically approve a member prior to their being allowed to exchange information or participate in a forum. Who is allowed to participate in a forum is entirely up to the administrators or moderators managing the forum.
How do Forums Work?
Forums typically are arranged by topics, for example, there might be a topic called “movies” and another topic called “music”. Inside each of these topics, or categories, there might be subcategories or posts. For example, inside the topic Movies there might be a subcategory called Comedy, etc. Inside these categories and subcategories there will be posts that have been made by other members. These posts, or threads, are followed up by other members who are exchanging in dialog with each other on the topic.
How are Users Notified of Responses?
When a user posts a response to a message online they are “subscribing” to that post. They are then notified by email of responses that are made to their post in the future by other members.
This is probably not the most in-depth description as to how a forum typically works but I thought that it was simple and to the point.
I just got finished reading an article that got pushed out in the Sitepoint Times by Kevin Yank that was titled, “Table-Based Layout Is the Next Big Thing”. It was a good read that discussed how the upcoming release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 is finally going to offer support for CSS Tables. This should be exciting. Here’s a link to the article I found in their Tech Times.
For me coming up as an old-school developer, before CSS was a household name in the developer community, embracing CSS for doing anything other than formatting fonts on a page has been a struggle. Not only is it more time consuming, it also has been of little importance to browser manufacturers until recently. I am glad to see it is making some headway, it’s the efforts of folks like the sitepoint blogger’s, the list apart guys, and a few others that have kept the issue of compatibility relevant.
In the article Kevin hit the nail right on the head with this comment:
The lengths to which designers must go to produce, say, a simple three-column layout using CSS techniques are so extreme that many web designers simply give up on CSS and resort to HTML tables for their layout. The Tech Times #142 and #143 were devoted to this issue.
This is dead on in my opinion, or at least most of the developers I know that have been in the business for a while fall into this before mentioned category. With the release of IE8 we are at least going to have another option for layouts as well as something that Kevin didn’t mention and that is how we turn out tabular data from a database, which is something else I have struggled with in the past. This should be an awesome improvement.
If you haven’t already I suggest reading the article, it’s pretty good. Here’s the link again…
I ran across something pretty cool today on Amazon that I thought was worthwhile posting here. It’s a neat little device that’s put out by online retailer Amazon.com. Here’s a little bit of info on the Amazon Kindle:
Amazon Kindle is a revolutionary portable reader that wirelessly downloads books, newspapers, magazines and blogs to a crisp, high-resolution electronic paper display that looks and reads like real paper, even in bright sunlight.
Kindle customers, no matter where they are in the U.S., can wirelessly shop the Kindle Store and download new content — all without a PC or a WiFi hot spot. Amazon pays for Kindle’s wireless connectivity so there are no monthly wireless bills and no service commitments for customers. The Kindle Store contains over 90,000 books that can be purchased and delivered wirelessly to Kindle, each in less than a minute. Customers can choose from hundreds of top newspapers, magazines and blogs and have their subscriptions auto-delivered wirelessly. All New York Times Best Sellers and New Releases are $9.99, unless marked otherwise.
At 10.3 ounces, Kindle is lighter and thinner than a paperback book, carries two hundred books, and includes built-in access to The New Oxford American Dictionary and wireless access to the Earth’s biggest encyclopedia, Wikipedia.org.
I noticed the other day that YouTube experienced a Global Outage, I did a little digging to find out what exactly happened. This is something I do routinely when a large site goes down so I can learn from others mistakes and use what I learn to insure that my clients websites don’t suffer a similar fate. This incident is kind of interesting in that I have never seen a case where a Country was able to block the entire world from a website. I still have a lot of questions about this and haven’t really found any answers as to how this really went down. Here’s what I did find on WHIR about this…
In a statement released by YouTube on Monday, many users around the world could not access the website for about two hours because traffic had been routed according to erroneous Internet protocols.
According to reports, Pakistan ordered local Internet service providers to block access to the website because it was running material insulting to Islam. However, a government telecommunications official said there was no intention to block the website worldwide. The order has now been lifted after YouTube removed the content deemed insulting to Islam.
The authority had earlier justified its order to block access in Pakistan saying it was necessary to avoid unrest in the predominantly Muslim country of 160 million people and that the video content had the potential to cause more possible loss of life and property across the country.
Internet monitoring firm Renesys says the block extended over two-thirds of the global Internet population, with the greatest affect seen in Asia where the outage lasted for up to two hours.
My Question is, how did this happen? My guess is that somehow it happened through DNS, but I am not for sure. If anyone has any knowledge how this happened please hit me back. Here’s a link to WHIR’s artcile on this outage: Web Host Industry News | Pakistan Causes YouTube Blackout
Kindle: Amazon’s New Wireless Reading Device: Kindle Store