Spin Ink

Well, it has been a hell of a journey, and a serious pain in the ass, but I managed to migrate all of my domains to the new Debian server at Dreamhost. It took a little over a week and involved a lot of late nights, but it was all for the best. I transferred 49 email accounts, 28 databases, 19 ftp accounts, 15 domains, 2 turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree. The email accounts were a real bitch, the databases were a hassle, the users and their domains were easy, and the turtle doves went quietly after I shot the partridge out of the pear tree.

I now have SSH access, PHP5, WebDav, CVS, and several other goodies. Best of all, Dreamhost just recently quadrupled the storage and octupled the bandwidth for all of their shared hosting plans! I now have 60GB of storage and 1.6TB of bandwidth every month! Perhaps even cooler than that is that, they increase my storage by 480MB/week and my bandwidth by 16GB/week. That is just insane! I am now drunk with storage and bandwidth. Dreamhost even offers 3 callbacks every 30 days with the plan I purchased.

The only downside is that due to their staggering amount of clients, support ticket responses can take as long as 24 hours. Personally, one of my tickets was responded to in less than 1 hour, while another took 4 hours and another took 12 hours. I really don’t have an issue with this, you can set the severity of your ticket and im sure that ‘Site Down’ gets immediate attention and a very quick response.

Overall, I welcome our new web hosting overlords. Dreamhost has a great reputation, unbelievable hosting plans, awesome support, and a lot of fat pipes! If you are still reading this, I thank you for your interest and your time. Here is a coupon code that will allow you to waive the $49.95 setup fee, ‘FEEFREESETUP’ should you decide to get your own account. Cheers.

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My host(old host by the time you read this) has been really good to me for the last 2.5 years I have been with them. The best part has been their response time, if I posted a support ticket, I had a response within minutes, 90% of the time. There have only been a few minor downtimes durring that period, the longest of which by far was around 6 hours. This was not a deal breaker for me though. I am leaving them because the admin would make changes to the server or have downtime and not tell me about it until I heard it from my clients and then submitted a support ticket to ask what happened. I found this to be completely unacceptable.

Most Recently, the admin decided to apply an update to the server that had been poorly tested. This update involved a migration of IMAP email from MBox to MailDir format, a changed certificate, and mucking with the acceptable authentication modes for the email server. This caused me more grief than you can possibly imagine. (more…)

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Wordpress 2.0 came out today, much to the delight of bloggers every where. I was somewhat hesitant to upgrade my own site for fears of breaking the Gallery2 integration. Mostly, I was afraid that my images I have integrated with my site, would dissappear. Furthermore, I thought that my modrewrite URLs for both my articles and my gallery would no longer work, which would really mess up google referrals.

So, I did some testing on a spare domain to be sure that everything would work. Just to be safe, I backed up my entire domain, and then began the very short and sweet Wordpress upgrade process. It only took a couple of minutes and much to my surprise, my site was still in one piece! My galleries are working fine, all my images are still present and accounted for.

This success can be attributed to the very hard work of the Wordpress development team. Also, a huge thanks goes out to Greg for doing souch a fantastic job with the Wordpress Gallery2 Integration plugin. While my resources are very limited, I urge you all to support these awesome projects and the people that develop them.

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While examining my server logs it occured to me that not all SuSE Linux users are irc users. Where do these people go to find more information on how to use SuSE Linux? I suspect that google and online forums are their main sources of support. So in an effort to provide more resources for this user base, I am going to do my best to cover the common tasks and questions we receive in the SuSE irc channel on freenode. First I plan to cover ‘how to upgrade Firefox to version 1.5′. If you have any suggestions for topics that you would like me to cover, please leave them in a comment on this entry. Below is a list of a few more articles about SuSE I have written.

• SuSE 10 For Windows Users
• Additional YaST Sources

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I am in the process of updating the scripts that run my website. One of the many changes I am making is to switch from Coppermine Photo Gallery to Gallery2. The plan was to integrate the Merlefest gallery into my websites design, as I have with my other gallery. Due to some technical issues in integrating multiple galleries into my design, this is taking longer than planned. I hope to have the gallery back up soon.

*Update*
– 10-03-2005 11:45 pm - The new layout is now integrated and I just need to upload the picture to the new gallery script. I have decided to quit using sub-domains because of the technical issues they cause between the various scripts I am using. Consequently, I apologize to anyone who ends up on a ‘404 Error page‘

– 10-04-2005 9:45 pm - The pictures are back! However I lost the numbers on how many times each image had been viewed yet again. Total, the ‘view count’ for all the images added together would be over 45,000!

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I have finally taken a moment to update the site to be fully css compliant and I got rid of the flash elements. I am now converting my CuteNews articles to Wordpress, and moving my pictures from Coppermine photo gallery to Gallery 2. Come back soon for an update. New Site Features will include: RSS Feeds, Better Theme Integration, Panorama Viewer.

*Update*
– 10-02-2005 09:15 pm - The new design is up! Rather than reinventing the wheel and spending a lot of time doing so, I decided to use the best open source WordPress theme that I could find as a starting point. I would like to thank Phu Ly for making such a great WordPress theme and then sharing it with the world.

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I am in the process of converting the sites contents to a tableless design using CSS. The index page you are reading is already finished. This will make the site much more accessible and consistent for everyone.

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