One of my side hobbies is a living history group that re-creates the middle ages as they ought to have been. I have been in charge of several websites for them since 2005. Read the rest of this entry »
I wanted to add the picture that I made for the Collegium event for the Highland Foorde web page.
http://www.myinkblog.com/2008/06/11/create-an-awesome-grass-texture-in-photoshop/
I suspect I’ll be using this one.
Computers break. It’s a fact of life in this world of technology. But when a company’s job is to provide hosting services to its customers, and the server fails, a hot spare should be ready to pop in at all time. Redundancy is a key concept in data management.
http://psd.tutsplus.com/tutorials/drawing/minion-despicable-me-photoshop/
I’m saving this so I don’t have to look it up later.
I have been playing the harp for about 12 years. Many people are convinced that I’m a really good harperist. I don’t have a big repertoire, but what I do play, I play well. What people see (or hear) is the final product – the end result of a certain amount of behind the scenes work. They hear music that is pleasing to their ears, and that’s all they care about. Web design and development are like that too. Read the rest of this entry »
So, after migrating to the new host, Godaddy.com, I discovered that my wordpress site is really slow. After doing a bit of research, I discovered that godaddy.com recommends using a cache plug-in. I’ve installed one – we’ll see how this goes. So far it seems to be faster, but it’s sort of like taking your blood pressure. It might be high one time, normal the next, low the next, and then astronomically high the time after that. This is why doctors don’t usually freak out over one high blood pressure – it could be a fluke. Likewise, the speed of my blog loading faster or slower could be related to absolutely nothing I did.
In class, we are working on setting up a site for an organization called Women in Maryland Higher Education. Their acronym is WIMHE, which seems kind of wimpy, to me, but hey, it’s their site, and honestly, I don’t have any suggestions for something better. Their goal is to provide resources for women who work in Higher Education in Maryland. We’re putting together a wordpress site for them, and you probably guessed already – it’s being hosted on Godaddy.com too. Why? Because our instructor is ultimately going to be the tech support guy for it, and he uses Godaddy.com. (Side note – this decision is partially what influenced me to switch to godaddy.com instead of another company – I rely strongly on word-of-mouth advertising. If my friends have good experiences, I probably will as well.)
There are five of us in the class, and we’re working together on getting the site up and running. I missed a couple of weeks of class due to illness, so didn’t get to help much with the first planning stages of the site building. Now, though, I’m caught up, and able to help. I have the FTP info already loaded into Filezilla, and having just upgraded my personal site to godaddy.com using wordpress, I am familiar with the process of getting godaddy to load wordpress for you. I walked Sean (our instructor) through the steps (though I’m fairly sure he didn’t really NEED me to walk him through it), and then we waited. As soon as the site became available, all five of us jumped into action.
Yes – you probably guessed it. No good can come of this.
So many people hitting a new site all at once, making changes, adding plugins, changing themes… it really slowed that site down. And speaking of slowing it down… it’s having the same slowdown issues that my site is. I’m going to go ahead and add a caching plugin to it as well.
About two years ago I decided to move to an actual hosting service, rather than use my ISP’s provided web space. While looking around for a good host, I came across one that looked like it might suit my needs. As I poked my way through to try to find out the bottom-line cost of hosting, I went most of the way through the process, and then closed the page. Imagine my surprise when 10 minutes later I received an invoice for my web hosting order from the company. I decided to let their dirty marketing ploy work, and after a fair amount of difficulty understanding eleven2.com’s cpanel and database controls, I got my website up and running. Now, two years later, I’m moving my sites to godaddy.com, so that I can have all of my sites in one place.
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One of the most frustrating things about working with technology is that the technology is frequently if not usually designed by someone who has never used the technology in question. Currently, I am working with a vendor that uses a very different business model – they actually work WITH the customer to develop a product that is usable and meets the customer’s needs. Read the rest of this entry »
It is important to remember that any time you are working in or on a server with data actively passing through it, that anything you do could potentially affect that data. Excuses are no good when you bring an entire system to a screeching halt. Read the rest of this entry »