Structure Geek » Meta

I Broke Twitter

James Crowley — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:46:52 +0000

Just went to use Twitter for the first time in months (I don’t even follow people, except through Google Reader), and the site is down from a DOS attack. Oh, well.

Posted in Meta Tagged: correlation does not equal causation, denial of service, Twitter

What am I doing?

James Crowley — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 04:08:56 +0000

To quote myself:

Noticing I haven’t blogged in months, but have posted 3 blog comments, 29 Delicious links, joined MySpace, Facebook and freaking Twitter.

That’s not…this was not…this is not the plan.

Posted in Meta Tagged: blogging, social networking

Where I went

James Crowley — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:20:47 +0000

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, HostICan’s Base-Host shared hosting plan.

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.

Testing

James Crowley — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 14:03:54 +0000

If this post shows up, then I have successfully migrated to a new webhost.

As others see us

James Crowley — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:23:43 +0000

Incidentally, if people took a look at their sites without stylesheets enabled now and then, they might realize that their damned outdated WordPress installs have been compromised. And then those of us who run custom stylesheets wouldn’t be sick to death of seeing all the “hidden” spam links within said compromised blogs. Just a thought….

Naked Structure

James Crowley — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 18:43:50 +0000

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. When I feel the need for teh pretty, I’ll swap in one of the W3C’s Core Styles. All of this has had the benefit of opening my eyes early on to the evils of tag soup and table-based layout, and the need for real web standards.

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.)

Upgraded WordPress

James Crowley — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 15:33:18 +0000

I downloaded and installed the latest stable release of WordPress the instant that Zeldman’s announcement appeared in my feed list, for two reasons.

My one big commitment to myself, before I registered a domain name, was that I wouldn’t allow my blog to become a spam-ridden linkfarm. That’s why, even though I haven’t added to this blog in many months, I’ve been regularly upgrading and maintaining this blog nonetheless. Semper vigilans.

It also didn’t hurt that Happy Cog is involved with the new WordPress, either; it was Zeldman’s advocacy that convinced me to use WordPress at all, instead of the Blosxom setup I’d been using locally. I have a weakness for hair-shirt minimalism, but my awareness of and admiration for Zeldman’s work goes waaay back in Internet Time.

(Though I must say I was surprised—like many fans of web standards who drew initial inspiration from Zeldman’s cry of to hell with bad browsers—by his defence of A List Apart‘s announcement of the flawed IE8 version targeting proposal, which Microsoft has since abandoned.)

Maybe I’ll use this new and improved version of WordPress to actually, you know, blog.

Though I wouldn’t count on it.…

A fresh start

James Crowley — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 23:34:11 +0000

Today I went ahead and registered a domain, set up hosting, and generally took steps to give myself a “real” website.

I’ve been on the net for more than a decade but I’ve never had a net home of my own. What encouraged me to take the plunge was seeing my handful of blog posts at wordpress.com make their way into Google faster than I thought possible (2 days after enabling search engine crawling). I know enough about googlejuice to realize that if I was going to commit to a blog—or even a vanity page—it would be best to have my own domain.

(I also took the opportunity to take down the old blog, issue removal requests to google, and be slightly more selective about what I reposted on the new domain.)

Now I’ll just have to see if this newfound concern for my internet identity translates into a greater commitment to posting fresh content.…

ETA: I just commented on a recent danah boyd post which was a proximate cause for my setting up a website after all these years.