Breaking news stereotype

June 27th, 2009

Concerning every tv station worldwide that had a news report about the recent death of Michael Jackson, this comic written by John Campbell is pure genious: http://stereotypist.livejournal.com/131545.html.

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WiredTree VPS 384 under load

June 22nd, 2009

One of the first question I had prior to moving to WiredTree’s VPS 384 plan was how much traffic would it be able to handle. An answer came on June 14th when someone submitted a page from a website I have on this VPS to reddit where it stood on the first page for almost an entire day.

Read more…

alecs Uncategorized

Opera version checking

May 31st, 2009

Seems that the new Opera release (version 10) is having problems with specifying its version. Some websites detected the first character in “10″ and assumed it to be Opera version 1 (talk about dumb checks). So the solution was to keep the version at “9.8″.

full story at sitepoint

alecs news ,

Laughing time

May 31st, 2009

Some have a lot of free time on their hands

April 2nd, 2009

… some meaning Google.

Along with the CADIE they also launched Chrome 3D. And this even works. Check the following screenshot:

chrome 3d

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Smashing usability fail

March 28th, 2009
Smashing Magazine contact address

Smashing Magazine contact address

I registered yesterday for an account at Smashing Magazine Forum. Somehow, my account dissappeared during the night and I cannot login anymore.

After entering my account details in the login form I am told that my username does not exist and that I should contact the mighty board administrator. Check his email in the screenshot.

And yes, the email does bounce back.

alecs Uncategorized

Xmarks problem

March 28th, 2009

xmarks

A few days ago I had to update my FoxMarks addon to the new Xmarks.

Today I couldn’t log in on Smashing Magazine forum (or any other website) thanks to foxmarks xmarks. Yes, a browser restart fixed the problem but come on…

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WiredTree special offer

March 21st, 2009

If you are planning on purchasing a VPS you should seriously consider WiredTree’s special offer:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=765870

Just use the coupon VPS384DOUBLESUPER2009 when ordering the VPS 384 plan. It’s only available until the 24th pf March, 2009.

alecs Uncategorized

Leaving ResellerZoom behind

March 17th, 2009
reseller zoom cancellation

ResellerZoom cancelation message

Today I’ve finally submitted the cancellation form at Reseller Zoom. It was just… too much. I wouldn’t recommend them to anyone looking for some decent uptime or anyone wanting to host dynamic sites with more than 500 visitors per day.

Some history

I’ve purchased their failover package in June, 2008. I was moving from another reseller and was looking for some uptime improvements. The package description was very promising: having 2 servers (web server & mysql server) that would be able to carry each other’s load in the event that one of them crashed. Everything went fine for a few months. All my websites were running smoothly and there were no major problems as far as I could tell.

Then (around the beginning of 2009) the failover server started to generate 500 - internal server error pages. This went on and on until I figured it wasn’t worth it anymore. So I downgraded to their Advanced package since the failover was always… failing.

They were kind enough to transfer my reseller account from one server to another. However, this is when the real problems began:

  • Almost every day the mysql server would stop responding. I know this because I have a cron job set up on one of my sites and I was getting a lot of “MySQL server has gone away.” errors via email. At least the email was working.
  • lolhome.com got suspended for causing load on the server. Surely 2000 visits/day is more than their server could handle.
  • In March 2009 downtime was something I really got used to.

Next on the list

I’ve moved to wiredtree. It isn’t fair to compare the 2 services because their are totally different. Although I now have to pay double the amount I used to, my websites are loading faster than ever. I’m completely satisfied with them but I hesitate to write any review based on my short experience.

However, I’ve been with 2 hosting companies already and although they were both great at the beginning I was forced to cancel their services because of hosting problems.

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How to display the page rank

March 16th, 2009

If you are looking for a way to determine the Google page rank for a group of websites, here’s a simple solution:

Download the page rank script and test it on your web server.

Note that the server is forced to query one of Google’s servers each time you call the page rank function. Because page rank doesn’t change very often (at least the one displayed by G’s toolbar) you can greatly improve performance by caching it. For example if you run a directory of websites you can set up a cron job to run and keep the page rank values updated.

Imagine the time it would take for a page with more than 400 URLs to display the page rank in real time (e.g. DirPedia).

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