Getting the best possible web hosting is for obvious reasons something that all website owners aim to do. However, you might know what type of web hosting you are looking to get but still do not know what provider to partner up with. Many of the web hosting top lists you find on the web today look the same as they all take the same things into account. These guides usually take into account similar factors and cost usually is weighted highly. While many people do simply look for the cheapest host with decent reviews, there are others who seek slightly more from their provider. Below are some of the most sought after hosting types (dedicated, shared, vps, green) and some of the providers within those categories who may be overlooked by users but provide some excellent service.
It’s been awhile since my last personal news post, and I figure that enough has been happening to warrant yet another exciting news update. Yay! ;)
So let’s see, first on my mind is the recent launch of the new design for Monzilla Media, the official site for my personal website and graphic design business. The first two versions of the site were single-page brochure sites, but this new version is fully loaded, featuring tons of portfolio content, business news, and service information. If you’ve got a minute, I would love to hear your feedback!
As a quasi-reclusive introvert with paranoiac-critical tendencies, one of my least favorite aspects of blogging involves creating those dreadful “About” pages that reveal unknown things about you. About pages are important to many people, providing a way to learn about and connect with the person or people “behind the blog.” After all, websites are relatively impersonal, as viewers are required to extract meaning and personality from behind a large, square piece of machinery.
Regardless of the type of site or blog you happen to be creating, the About page is your primary key to connecting with your readers. In fact, when readers click to read your About page, they expect to find you there, sharing personal information about yourself, your ideas, your purpose and story. Fortunately, About pages are as diverse as the millions of bloggers who create them. This is one of the reasons that the humble About page has become one of the most important pages in the blogosphere — they represent the essence of the blogger, revealing their personality, originality, and uniqueness.
Duetopopulardemand, I am proud to announce the release of a new widgetized version of the free AddMySite (AMS) plugin for WordPress. The new version (0.88) is compatible with all versions of WordPress (including all WP 2.3+), and is easily integrated into any widget-capable area (e.g., sidebars, footers, etc.) of any widget-friendly WordPress theme. Simply activate, drag & drop into place, and enjoy! Once the widget has been activated, AMS enables site visitors to easily and quickly add your site or feed to as many as 40 social-bookmarking and/or feed aggregation services.
By default, version 0.88 of AMS automatically uses the information specified in your WP Admin for your blog name, blog address, and feed URL. Thus, manual code editing is no longer required for the plugin to work as intended. However, if you would like to customize any of the predefined variables, simply use the nifty popup menu provided on the AMS widget icon. Everything is completely widgetized, automated, and customizable! For more information about AddMySite, or to download yourself a fresh copy, visit the official AMS information page »
Fifty Favorite Favicons If you have a website, you need a favicon. For those who may not know, favicons are the small, square icons that frequently are associated with websites. Favicons appear in many places, including browser toolbars, bookmarks, tabs, and address bars. Favicons provide immediate visual identification of their represented sites, enabling super-easy navigation for Web users. While surfing bookmarks with fifty tabs open, finding and clicking on icons is far more efficient than reading through piles of link text. Yet, beyond making it easier for people to identify and locate their favorite websites, favicons also play a critical role in site branding and product recognition. Popular browsers such as Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer are virtually re-branded when favicon-enabled sites are displayed. For example, observe how willingly modern browsers conform to the image of web designer/developer Jonathan Snook:
The über-trendy “Web-2.0” paradigm seems to be floating quite comfortably throughout the blogosphere these days. In fact, with it’s current mainstream popularity, the Web-2.0 mentality enjoys de facto status as the dominating influence behind modern website development and design. Not too long ago, however, Web-2.0 hovered quietly amidst the thinking of cutting-edge entrepreneurs and developers, as they strove toward freshness, simplicity, and usability.
Before it’s rise to media fame, Web 2.0 was merely a loosely defined set of concepts and ideals. As the concept materialized, representative sites emerged, and the Web-2.0 design aesthetic evolved into an easily recognizable collection of stylistic elements, minimalistic interfaces, and dynamically interactive functionality. Indeed, now that Web 2.0 has hit it’s stride, its characteristics are well defined and apparent to even the most casual observations.
Perishable Press switched to A Small Orange [ASO] in March of 2007. At the time, I was looking for highly recommended shared hosting with several key features:
Update 2011/02/05: ASO is no longer my host. As this article explains, ASO service was great at the start, but after three years quality of service has declined considerably. There are some great people at ASO, but I can no longer recommend them for serious web hosting. For more information, check out my post on switching to Media Temple.</update>
Solid customer service and extremely reliable server uptime
Unlimited domains with plenty of disk space and bandwidth
Unlimited Email accounts, MySQL databases and everything else
A Small Orange delivers all of the above in every shared hosting plan. ASO provides hosting plans perfect for any size operation:
Figuratively speaking, hunting down and killing spammers, scrapers, and other online scum remains one of our favorite pursuits. Once we have determined that a particular IP address is worthy of banishment, we generally invoke the magical powers of htaccess to lock the gates. When htaccess is not available, we may summon the versatile functionality of PHP to get the job done.
This method is relatively straightforward. Simply edit, copy and paste the following code example into the top of any PHP for which you wish to block access:
Shouts out: First of all, to everyone who reads my content on a regular basis, thank you! Things are finally rolling along quite smoothly, and I just wanted to take a moment to let you know that I truly appreciate your kind participation with Perishable Press. We have some great things planned in the near future, and look forward to sharing them with you.
Business
Currently, I have several new projects in the works. I am redesigning my business site, Monzilla Media, developing several new blogs, and reporting here as much as possible throughout the process. These projects should provide a wealth of fresh material covering everything from CSS design and PHP scripting to SEO tactics and blog monetization.
After studying Peter Kent’s excellent book, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, several key methods emerged for optimizing websites for the search engines. Although the book is written for people who are new to the world of search engine optimization (SEO), many of the principles presented throughout the book remain important, fundamental practices even for the most advanced SEO-wizards. This article divulges these very useful SEO practices and organizes them into manageable chunks 1.
Text Essentials
The golden rule for developing a popular website is to create a useful site and share it with as many people as possible. When designing a site for search engine popularity, use clear, readable text. Replace non-standard text characters with standard equivalents. By all means, check the spelling, grammar, and syntax of your text manually, or at the very least, using an automatic spell-checker. If you are targeting the giant Google search engines, your design mantra should be, “black text on white background” — that is, keep it simple, straightforward, and focus on quality content. And finally, never use image-based text in place of searchable, text-based content.
“Perhaps it’s time for a bizarre diversion…” — Wild Bill recommends these bizarre Flash websites for your personal entertainment, education, and enjoyment:
monoface For a few delightful moments of splendid online fun, prance on over to the hilariously interactive Flash interface currently on display at monoface. Once there, click the "shuffle face" link a few times to get the general idea, and then graduate to plastic surgeon by clicking on the various facial components themselves. Each click mixes androgynous Flash flesh further and further into bizarro land, where smooth blending manifests disturbed visions of hermaphroditic unrest..
heiwa-alpha.co.jp Flexing some incredible Flash muscle, the good citizens over at heiwa-alpha (update 12/2008: site seems to be down..) have produced a Flash site of monolithic proportions. The sheer magnificence of the animated imagery and truly remarkable attention to detail make this surrealistic visual feast one of Wild Bill’s personal favorites. Indeed, for a delightful romp through the collective mind of some truly gifted Flash engineers, crank up the broadband, dust off the Japanese translator, and drop in for a wonderfully bizarre Flash diversion..
In his excellent book, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, Peter Kent explains that many search engines actually get their search results from one (or more) of the larger search engines, such as Google or The Open Directory Project. Therefore, the author concludes that it may not be necessary to spend endless hours registering with thousands of the smaller search sites. Rather, the author provides a brief list of absolutely essential search sites with which it is highly recommended to register. Further, by registering with the following sites, your site will be listed in a significant majority of all search engines.
Optimizing your website for the search engines involves many important aspects including keyword development, search engine registration, and SEO logging. This Press post scopes yet another critical weapon in the SEO wars: establishing and evolving an effective link campaign.
Within your SEO log, you should devote an entire section to the logging of all link-related activity associated with optimizing your site for the internet. For example, you may wish to subcategorize your link campaign according to whether the links are elsewhere, pointing to your site (referring/incoming links), or present within your site, pointing to other sites (external/outgoing links). Users may also benefit from tracking activity for internal links, which point to other locations within the same domain.
We will begin our article by focusing on incoming and outgoing link strategies, proceed with a few tips for internal links, and then conclude with some ideas for getting links.
Let’s face it. Websites are as transient as the wind. Developers and designers spend countless hours producing sites that may exist online for mere months or even less before being restructured, redesigned or removed completely, forever disappearing into eternal nothingness — or, even worse, into the sterile void of a search engine database. Clearly not the best situation for designers looking to maintain a complete record of their online work.
Even for sites proactively encouraging their caching and archiving by the search engines, accurate and reliable online site preservation approaches the impossible. Unfortunately, search engines are extremely inconsistent when it comes to archiving websites. If you doubt that, try digging up one of your old sites and see how it looks as stored deep within the archives of say, Google or Yahoo. Search engine archives commonly omit associated CSS, JavaScript, and image files, rendering sites incomplete and useless as a design reference.
Local or offline site storage also is impractical, especially if your sites are database-driven and require a server to process content. Replicating the original server environment is usually a hassle, requiring database reconfiguration and URL path repairs. Further, databases frequently involve absolute URL’s, thereby rendering offline sites practically useless. Besides, many sites are often aesthetically redundant, consisting of hundreds of virtually identical, dynamically created pages. Such archived sites are waste of disk space, especially if their content is now obsolete or exists elsewhere online.
Rather than rely on the search engines or depend on impractical offline archiving methods, savvy web designers and developers should develop a concise, high-quality screenshot archive of all their work. A well-maintained screenshot archive is an invaluable design tool providing streamlined reference for future projects, source material, and portfolio development. Clearly, from a visual-design perspective, screenshot archiving is far more valuable, useful, and beneficial than traditional methods of storing antiquated or otherwise dismantled websites.
This post is a working repository of code edits and other changes made to Perishable Press themes in order for them to function properly in Internet Explorer 7 (IE7)..
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the business of every serious webmaster. The process of optimizing a website for the search engines involves much more than properly constructed document headers and anchor tags. Websites are like trees: their roots are the growing collection of content presented through the branching universe of the World Wide Web. Or something. The point is that optimizing a website requires nurturing the site itself while also ensuring proper exposure to the requisite elements of the internet.
The process of optimizing your first website may seem daunting. There are many aspects to consider and many websites with which to deal. Search engine registration, keyword development, and an evolving link campaign are all required for any home-grown, roll-your-own website optimization. Further, for each site you intend to optimize, there is a plethora of related data — site links, usernames, passwords, email addresses, etc. — that needs to be collected, organized, and updated. Therefore, it is essential to properly record and consistently maintain a carefully crafted SEO log.
Keywords play a vital role in search engine optimization (SEO), and — if used properly — have the potential to increase the flow of traffic to your site. It is beneficial to maintain an active list of keywords for each of your websites. Each list should be a continually evolving set of important, relevant keywords. The idea here is to develop a consistent practice of actively seeking better keywords, thereby producing your very own customized keyword library.
Aside from an occasional gang squirt, Moses Lake, Washington has no graffiti art scene of which to speak. Yes, there are many vast, open walls available for inspired artists to develop into colorful statements of creative expression. However, city officials and general public opinion frown on graffiti art as worthless, wicked vandalism. Granted, the city does offer several commissioned murals, mainly scenic visions of the ordinary rural variety. Unfortunately, those of us craving authentic expressions of genuine creativity must travel elsewhere to enjoy such diverse cultural fruit.
Imported graffiti art, picked fresh daily Or so we thought. Recently we discovered a daily supply of local, fresh graffiti. A short drive out Moses Lake's Wheeler Road reveals a west-coast freight-car loading station. And, as any connoisseur of aerosol art is aware, graffiti artists love to paint on freight cars. Sure enough, a quick drive into the loading area manifests a colorful line of beautifully decorated railcars. To see such dynamic and intense expressions of deliberation and purpose is like opening the window of youth and shooting up a truckload of rainbows. “..an unexpected pleasure — we are honored by your presence..”
Better still, the railcars are there on business, meaning they are constantly showing up, getting loaded, and taking off, thereby making room for the next set of traveling canvases. Every day, there is a fresh selection of imported west-coast graffiti art ripe for the pickinz. And pick I do — at least three times a week, every week, I drive out to the station early in the morning to examine, admire, and capture the daily gallery. For several weeks now, my collection of high-resolution digital photographs of west-coast graffiti has been growing.
Soon, the collection will be available at perishable.biz, which will feature artwork, digital photos, video chunks, audio turdz, and now, imported graffiti art. Why two Perishable websites? While perishablepress.com focuses on written material, code, and other text, perishable.biz presents creativity as expressed via aural, visual, and digital media. "You gotta keep 'em separated."
Indeed, this segregation of Perishable content enables us to consolidate an online resource (perishablepress.com) for news and information concerning everything associated with all of our creative endeavors. Further, an informational repository such as perishablepress.com enables us to focus entirely on artistic and other creative content at our other sites, such as perishable.biz, deadletterart.com, and artspacemagazine.com.
Recently, every website on our primary server was simultaneously attacked. The offending party indiscriminately replaced the contents of everyindex file, regardless of its extension or location, with a few vulgar lines of code, which indicated intention, identity, and influence.
Apparently, the attack occurred via Germany, through a server at the University of Hamburg. This relatively minor attack resulted in several hours of valuable online education. In this article, it is our intention to share experience with website attack recovery. This article is aimed at website developers, designers, and administrators.
The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is a trip into the online past, offering glimpses of ancient website relics. Reaching back through the virtual dark ages of 1996, the Wayback Machine chronicles over 55 billion pages. Although many of the pages appear incomplete due to missing images, the Wayback Machine provides an invaluable resource, enabling users to experience and learn from the arcane internet of yesterday.
The overly dramatic process of transferring our Online Empire to a new server and then back again manifests several valuable lessons. Please look back your note and observe the following suggestions during any future server migration and/or domain propagation events…
About a year ago we signed up with a hosting provider that offered one of the best hosting deals around: lots of space, bandwidth, and transfer — plus all of the usual server software amenities that make life easier. Everything went smoothly at first…
In fact, the first six months of service were close to 100%. The few help-ticket items submitted were promptly resolved in a professional manner. We were ready to start some business and everything was going great. Then, about five months ago, we began noticing a serious increase in server downtime. Help tickets were also slow-going and the responses were like these cryptic one-liners that failed to address the actual problem, demonstrating a serious lack of concern and providing virtually no help. Further, multiple emails concerning account billing and renewal went (and remain) completely ignored. Indeed, email remains their only method of communication. At this point, we felt stranded, ignored, and utterly alone. Given this level of service, we were not comfortable hosting websites for our clients.
![[ Photo: Cut Diamonds ]](http://perishablepress.com/press/wp-content/images/2009/web-hosting/diamonds_.jpg)
Getting the best possible web hosting is for obvious reasons something that all website owners aim to do. However, you might know what type of web hosting you are looking to get but still do not know what provider to partner up with. Many of the web hosting top lists you find on the web today look the same as they all take the same things into account. These guides usually take into account similar factors and cost usually is weighted highly. While many people do simply look for the cheapest host with decent reviews, there are others who seek slightly more from their provider. Below are some of the most sought after hosting types (dedicated, shared, vps, green) and some of the providers within those categories who may be overlooked by users but provide some excellent service.![[ Official 'Speed Linkin' Icon ]](http://perishablepress.com/press/wp-content/images/global/speed-linkin.jpg)
Kicking things off for this month’s official Speed Linkin’ post is a site designed to help with all of your ![[ Image: Fifty of my Favorite Favicons ]](http://perishablepress.com/press/wp-content/images/2007/favicons/favicon-collection.gif "Favicons from my fifty favorite feeds")
![[ Icon: A Small Orange ]](http://perishablepress.com/press/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/asmallorange.gif)
Perishable Press switched to ![[ Image: Skeletor Blocks a Move ]](http://perishablepress.com/press/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/block-senders.gif "'Sorry, but access is NOT allowed - ha ha ha ha ha!'")
Figuratively speaking, hunting down and killing spammers, scrapers, and other online scum remains one of our favorite pursuits. Once we have determined that a particular IP address is worthy of banishment, we generally invoke the magical powers of ![[ Image: Abstracted Light Curve ]](http://perishablepress.com/press/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/search-light.gif)
Shouts out: First of all, to everyone who reads my content on a regular basis, thank you! Things are finally rolling along quite smoothly, and I just wanted to take a moment to let you know that I truly appreciate your kind participation with Perishable Press. We have some great things planned in the near future, and look forward to sharing them with you.![[ Image: Abstracted Documents ]](http://perishablepress.com/press/wp-content/images/2007/misc-chunks/abstracted-documents.gif)
After studying Peter Kent’s excellent book, Search Engine Optimization for Dummies, several key methods emerged for optimizing websites for the search engines. Although the book is written for people who are new to the world of search engine optimization (SEO), many of the principles presented throughout the book remain important, fundamental practices even for the most advanced SEO-wizards. This article divulges these very useful SEO practices and organizes them into manageable chunks 1.
![[ Image: Wild Bill ]](http://perishablepress.com/press/wp-content/images/global/wild-bill.gif "'Indeed..'")
“Perhaps it’s time for a bizarre diversion…” — Wild Bill recommends these bizarre Flash websites for your personal entertainment, education, and enjoyment:
