Fri, 12 Sep 2008
I signed up for domain hosting through WordPress.com for $10/year. Total time, including PayPal transfer, DNS transfer, and importing all my posts? Less than ten minutes.
Why I switched
I only needed the minimal level of hosting that would allow me to keep my domain name and WordPress. Given how infrequently I blogged in the last year—fewer than one post a month—I couldn’t justify even the small cost or time associated with a typical shared hosting account. As I’ve noted before, I’ve been vigilant in maintaining and upgrading WordPress even when I wasn’t using it. Unfortunately, the WordPress Automatic Upgrade plugin works so well that I couldn’t pretend I was doing something with the site anymore. (A WordPress Upgrader is scheduled to be included in the core of WordPress 2.7, so ignoring the tool wasn’t the solution.) WordPress.com fit my minimal(ist) requirements.
What annoys me, and how I’ll fix it
There don’t seem to be any themes on WordPress.com that validate as CSS 2.1 (not even Sandbox). They all insist on stuffing in the CSS3 border-radius property, which is from a working draft, and various vendor-specific extensions as well. (The specification that defines vendor-specific extensions says: Authors should avoid vendor-specific extensions.
) So, rounded corners are more important than validation apparently. Damned designers….
Not all errors are the design flaws, though. The CSS Validation Service chokes on Sandbox’s three-digit RGB notation even though the relevant part of the spec explicitly ensures that white (#ffffff) can be specified with the short notation (#fff)
.
In short: It’s an imperfect world, and I’ll probably end up choosing the custom CSS option. (So much for not tinkering with the site….)
Where I was
A brief note on my previous web host.
As I recall, I was looking specifically for a WordPress host, and I found HostICan on WordPress.org’s list of some of the best and brightest of the hosting world
. Much comparison and examination and review-reading followed. For whatever reason, I think the post that finally convinced me to try HostICan was this one.
- Generally satisfactory.
- I never had any serious problems with my previous Base-Host shared hosting plan with HostIcan.
- Infrequent, transient downtime.
- I was never aware of any significant unscheduled downtime. However, I did notice slowdowns, and, very occasionally, my site would be unreachable for 10–30 seconds. Of course, this was on a shared hosting account; it’s not like I was paying for Five Nines reliability. Still, given how infrequently I accessed my site, it did make me wonder about how much downtime I wasn’t aware of.
- SSH access was not part of the base feature package.
- Other providers (notably, DreamHost) offer SSH as part of the standard shared hosting package. Even with the extra fee, though, the monthly rate was comparable to DreamHost’s. (And, as with DreamHost, there are various coupons / rebates available to lower the initial costs. I used Free HostICan Offers myself.)
The bottom line: if I needed to leave WordPress.com, I’d seriously consider doing business with HostICan again.
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Tags: CSS, HostICan, web hosting, WordPress, WordPress.com
Thu, 11 Sep 2008
If this post shows up, then I have successfully migrated to a new webhost.
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Tue, 13 May 2008
Posted in Ephemera | No Comments »
Tags: David Mamet, movies
Mon, 12 May 2008
Jack Williamson on writing science fiction for Harry Bates:
Most of the stories he published look pretty crude now, but they were stories. Concise, clearly written, about people solving problems. […] The hero had to be sympathetic, pitted against ugly evil. The conflict had to keep moving, rising steadily from a quick beginning to an exciting climax and then a triumphant resolution brought about by the hero himself.
Though such rules aren’t enough to make a story great, they do reflect fundamentals the writer has to master before he can ignore them. There are ways to win and hold interest. If the reader isn’t interested, early and firmly, all else is lost.
Source: Williamson, Jack. Wonder’s Child: My Life in Science Fiction. New York, N.Y.: Bluejay Books, 1984.
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Tags: Jack Williamson, pulp fiction, quotes, science fiction, writing
Fri, 25 Apr 2008
I read this and winced:
“Afghanistan is a mystical place completely infused with superstition and religion,” Mr. Myrick explained by phone. “I thought it would be an effective contemporary backdrop for a thriller.”
Daniel Myrick, of all people, managed to sound like a condescending marketroid chasing faded trends while promoting his new film, The Objective. This is particularly painful given his obvious desire not to be seen as a one-hit wonder who rode the zeitgeist atop the hype-machine that was The Blair Witch Project.
David Carr only makes it worse with his synopsis:
In the film a C.I.A. officer joins up with a Special Forces crew for a mission deep in the mountains and tells the team members little, at least very little that is true, about what they are actually looking for.
(I think I liked the sound of this movie better when it was called Predator….)
They are confronted by mortal and supernatural threats that leave the crew decimated and wondering precisely what it is up against.
(And I liked the sound of this movie better when it was called…The Blair Witch Project.)
I think it would be great if Mr. Myrick could succeed on his own terms–as he so clearly wants to–but if this is the culmination of nine years of effort, I have to wonder if he might have been better off selling out a bit more readily.
(Via The New York Times.)
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Tags: media, movies
Mon, 21 Apr 2008
Matt Mullenweg on his new design:
I wonder if there’s a way to only allow comments from people with Gravatars? It looks so much better.
Boy did that rub me the wrong way.
Still, it did inspire me to spend 2 minutes in The GIMP making this protest gravatar:
I’ve no idea if it’s original or not, because I zap avatars when browsing the web.
(I would simply have used a transparent image, but Gravatar is so amazingly lame that the latest version broke transparent PNG support.)
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Tags: blogging, gravatar, web standards
Mon, 21 Apr 2008
What started out as a simple bit of digital archaeology
has spawned an epic thread touching on journalistic ethics–and common courtesy–involving many of the original Implementors of Infocom. There are also a number of comments from familiar names of the post-Inform era, including Graham Nelson and Emily Short.
I’m sure that independent journalist
Andy Baio meant well, but it really was an error in judgment to distribute Activision IP (including internal Infocom email) without permission. And not contacting the parties being discussed was a somewhat rude way to thank people whose work he claims to admire.
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Tags: Infocom, interactive fiction, journalism
Tue, 08 Apr 2008
I’m participating in this year’s CSS Naked Day, using a plugin by Aja Lorenzo Lapus. I wouldn’t be much of a structure geek
if I didn’t support semantic markup and clean separation of content from design, now would I?
Amusingly, this naked
look is very nearly the way I see most web pages every single day. I’ve used a custom CSS stylesheet since Opera first supported them, back when the download still fit on a floppy disk. Even today, when I’m feeling especially minimalist, I’ll run a customized version of Bert Bos’s lynx.css
Since I switched to Firefox, Greasemonkey and, lately, Stylish have proven essential for letting me access content while providing a uniform look-and-feel to the whole net, minimizing distractions.
(Yeah, I know. Get off my lawn.)
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Tags: CSS, minimalism, web standards
