Posted 5 March 2008, by Aaron
January and February? I can’t believe they’re gone already. I was out of the country for a week towards the end of February and consequently failed to pick up on a great graphic design competition being run by Jacob Cass of Just Creative Design, and therefore missed out on a chance to win some freebies.
Jacob has rounded up $5,000 of various goodies to give away, all in return for writing an article of some sort on the subject of graphic design. I would have spread the word about this giveaway a lot earlier had it not been for the fact I only found out about it myself a couple of days ago.
Oh well, the competition ended last night and there are a wealth of juicy-looking entries in. Articles that I’ve found particularly eye-catching and have bookmarked for later reading include:
Head over to Just Creative Design to see a comprehensive list of all the entries as this competition has produced a wealth of useful information and if the few I’ve highlighted above don’t float your boat, I’m sure there’s something in there that will.
My hat goes off to Jacob for organising this competition/group writing project and also all the entrants for sharing their thoughts and ideas. Great stuff!
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Tags:Competition, Giveaway, Graphic Design, Group Writing
Posted 3 March 2008, by Aaron
If there is one thing that is more desperately needed than a new post on miLienzo.com, it is an update to the I Love Social Bookmarking plugin. Two birds. One stone!
Since its release ILSB has had a few minor niggles related to certain themes’ CSS and which sometimes caused display problems and browser discrepancies – usually involving Microsoft Internet Explorer.
The way I had written the code that draws the list and operates the hover-over function had good intentions at heart – for compliant browsers it was a pure CSS solution and for Internet Explorer there was a tiny bit of JavaScript doing the hover effect. Unfortunately, and without going in to too much detail as to why, the way I had written this code was problematic and causing these issues with a small number of users.
For this new release I have re-written the code that operates the hover-effect. It is now a completely JavaScript driven effect. This is a bit of a double-edged sword as whilst it will eradicate the problems users have previously experienced, it is of course not as pure as a CSS-driven hover effect and with this current release there will be accessibility issues if any of your blog readers use text readers or have JavaScript switched off.
In the end I decided I had to provide a plugin as solid as possible for the the mast majority of users. Rest assured that the JavaScript I’ve used is incredibly streamlined and efficient, and for a future release I will provide a JavaScript-free solution for those concerned with accessibility.
Head over to the ILSB page to download the latest release, and I’d love to hear your feedback on how you get on with it.
Note: If you are upgrading from a previous version of ILSB, your may have to refresh your browser to clear the old CSS from the cache as I’ve made a couple of changes to the style sheet.
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Tags:Accessibility, CSS, Internet Explorer, Plugins, Social Bookmarking, WordPress
Posted 7 February 2008, by Aaron
An unfortunate truth for any of us who buy web hosting is that there are a lot more bad hosts than there are good ones. Running a website can be a complicated affair at the best of times but when your site is down more often than it’s up, customer support takes days to respond to queries, and when they do they respond with a suspiciously East-European grasp of the English language, it can be excruciating.
I’ve been through more hosts than I care to count and most of them were rubbish. However, through my trials and tribulations I have stumbled across one or two good’uns so I feel I should share my story and pose one or two of the questions that you should ask yourself when searching for a
new host.
It’s not good to share
Anyone who has ever hosted a website will at some point have used a budget-priced shared hosting package of some sort. Priced from a few quid a month upwards, there are some amazing deals to be found. Unfortunately the shared arena is also the one most wrought with cowboys, bedroom hosts, and promises that simply can’t be delivered.
If one host is offering 1,500 GB of storage and 15,000 GB of bandwidth you can bet your bottom dollar there is another host offering even more. With some top of the range dedicated server packages offering only a fraction of that storage and bandwidth you have to ask how it all adds up? A typical shared host contends hundreds of customers on one server, so do the maths.
The fact is it doesn’t add up. The big flashy numbers are designed to sell, not provide. A shared host can not and will not ever provide that level of storage or bandwidth – ask anyone who’s ever suffered the Digg effect on their shared hosted blog!
In reality, if a shared hosting package is the most appropriate solution for you (and for the vast majority of people it is the most appropriate) then I would be very surprised if you needed 10 GB of storage, let alone 1,500 GB. And 50 GB of bandwidth is more than enough for most small to medium sized blogs.
When buying shared hosting don’t be suckered in by the unrealistic headline figures and remember the old truism “you get what you pay for” has rarely been truer. Sites like Webhost Magazine and Web Hosting Geeks provide users’ reviews from their hosting experiences, and whilst it must be remembered that people like to complain a lot more than they do compliment, these sites should help you avoid the worst of the bunch.
Out of the many shared hosts I’ve tried, I will only reserve a mention for one: Lunarpages. This site, miLienzo.com was with them all of last year and as far as I’m aware there was never any downtime and the site held up well under one very significant wave of traffic from a Stumbling and a Digg.
Virtual private servers
A virtual private server (VPS) is the next logical step for those who feel that maybe they’ve outgrown their basic shared host, or as is my case, you want to offer hosting as an added service to your clients.
A VPS is still essentially a shared environment. However, rather than being bundled in with the world and his dog, a VPS host generally contends from 4 to 16 customers on one server. What’s more is you also get many of the advanced features that a dedicated server provides: root SSH access, cron jobs, the ability to install custom applications.
Whilst it’s still possible to get a bad neighbour who abuses the server and affects the quality of your service, a good host will look out for this and move heavy users onto less contended machines to spread the load.
Prices for VPS hosts can range massively from £10 a month to £100 a month. As always, the more you pay the more you get in terms of storage, bandwidth and memory. The key with choosing a VPS lies in memory use. Generally you will be allocated a guaranteed memory limit and a non-guaranteed burstable limit. The theory is that your guaranteed memory is yours and yours only; the burstable limit is there if you need it but is shared amongst your follow customers so cannot be guaranteed.
It’s bad news if your memory usage is constantly above your guaranteed limit, which at entry level VPS plans is normally 256 MB. Unfortunately two or three WordPress blogs or Joomla sites can quickly eat into that so depending on how many sites you plan on hosting you may need to upgrade to a more expensive plan.
I made the move to VPS at the beginning of this year and I’m delighted with the move. Hopefully you will have noticed the massively improved speed of this site, and now I can resell hosting to my web design clients. After MUCH research I opted for Servint.net and I’m very happy with my decision. Their support is fantastic and very fast and I am yet to find anyone who has a bad word to say about them.
I completely unashamedly link to them using an affiliate link – something I never do – because I really do recommend them! Check out Servint.net for their range of VPS solutions.
Dedication is all you need…
… or so Roy Castle would have you believe. Because once you’ve got several dozen big clients on your books, or one of your sites is generating a million page views a month, it’s more than likely that you’ll have outgrown your VPS and need a dedicated server.
A dedicated server is exactly that – a server that sits in a rack in some data-centre that is all yours. But be warned, a dedicated server is not for the feint-hearted. Once your server is switched on it is up to you to log into your server using SSH, configure it and install whatever is necessary to make it do what you want it to. There are more expensive managed solutions available where some of responsibility of administering the system is taken off of your hands, but either way you still need to know what you’re doing.
Prices for dedicated hosts vary from the £30 a month range right up to eye-watering four figure fees. With a dedicated server the more you pay the more you get in terms of memory, CPU, storage, etc. It’s worth paying attention to your host’s connection to the Internet – I’ve seen some cheaper dedicated hosts offering a 10 MB connection to the Internet which is going to struggle under a Digg. Look for at least a 100 MB connection.
The other point to bare in mind is the quality of support. If you’re having difficulties getting your server up and running yourself (happens quite often with me) and you need to turn to support, what is the response going to be like? Are you going to have a friendly and helpful conversation or is it going to be excruciatingly long-winded where everything support suggests involves you paying them money to do some work?
One UK host I’ve been working with is Rapid Switch who boast the fastest network in the UK and one of the fastest in Europe. My experience of their support has not been fantastic but you can’t argue with their prices or the speed of their network.
Conclusions
Finding a host is not an easy business. The important thing is know what you need from a host, look to match those criteria, and then do your research. Find out what other people are saying about the host you have your eye on – is everyone complaining about their constant downtime and hideous customer service, or are loyal customers singing their praises?
Once you’ve made you choice, what guarantees have you got? A 99.9% up-time guarantee is an absolute minimum. Also, are you locking yourself into a twelve month contract or can you up sticks and move at any time. If the latter I suggest moving your sites over slowly so you can test and monitor the impact each site is having on your server’s performance.
What have your hosting experiences been like?
I’ve told you about some of the hosts I’ve had success with – what about you? Who would you recommend and why? What sort of things do you look out for when choosing a host?
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Tags:Web Design, Web Development, Web Hosting
Posted 17 January 2008, by Aaron
Do you have too much time on your hands? Are you sometimes left wondering what you could possibly do with all your spare time? Do you just wish that there was another instant-messaging-social-media know-what-you’re-doing-at-all-times thingy to play around with?
Well, I guessed not. But if you are interested I happen to have a few Jaiku invites available. Jaiku is a Twitterish microblogging tool/platform developed by some Finish folk and made the news last year when it was acquired by Google.
I joined Jaiku a couple of months ago and to be honest, I’m not sure I’ve fully taken to it yet. But microblogging is all the craze and it’s what the cool kids do. Apparently. And besides, as Jaiku is still open to invite only whilst Google do whatever they are doing to the platform, I suspect these invites might be in high demand?
So if you fancy an invite drop me a line below. First come, first served!
EDIT: All my invites have now been used so I’m closing comments on this thread now. Sorry if you’ve arrived too late 
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Tags:Google, Invites, Jaiku, Microblogging, Twitter
Posted 14 January 2008, by Aaron
A small group of Internet software developers in New York are hoping to turn the world of online art on its head with a new suite of creative applications called Aviary.
Aviary will consist of an entire flock of bird-themed applications to help you perform any creative task, from manipulating images, creating unique patterns and drawing vector graphics, right through to creating 3D models, audio mixing and even video editing.
It’s all one giant web-based RIA (Rich Internet Application) suite based on Adobe’s Flex platform. The guys developing the suite are keeping a blog which offers quite a few screenshots and even a few Flash videos of the applications in action.
My impressions based on these screenshots and videos is that the suite looks like a very slick toy. But toy it most certainly is – very bright and colourful, slightly Fisher Price!
However, as a demonstration of what is possible with RIAs it is nothing short of breathtaking. Sure, there are a few existing image manipulation tools and drawing tools knocking around, but this is an entire suite of webby-ajxay-flashy goodness – video editing… on the WEB?!
Looking deeper into the suite than just the creative toys, there seem to be some clever-sounding social media elements being built in, such as the ability to collaborate and share, and perhaps significantly, an online market place to trade your works of art.
I’m all for it! It’s not going to replace any serious professional tools we might use, but as a way of oiling the creative cogs and perhaps inspiring youngsters to try their hand at creating and sharing their work, it’s a great idea. And as an example of what is possible over the web these day, I’m very exited to see it in action!
I’m not the only one excited. Alan Mejer thinks Aviary promises to be one of the most exciting Web 2.0 apps yet. So what do you think Aviary promises? Will it gracefully soar to new heights and set new standards? Or will it come crashing to ground with bird-flu and gimmick stamped all over it?
BETA invites can be requested from the Aviary site.
Related articles:
Tags:Adobe, Creativity, Multimedia, Rich Internet Applications, Web 2.0
