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August 31st, 2010Web Hosting – why you should avoid Hosting.com
August 25th, 2010My web hosting company used to be called HostMySite.com until few years ago when it was bought out by Hosting.com. I have Linux basic plan. Since Hosting.com took over, the quality of service has gone down dramatically.
Now I will abandon ship soon. Do not buy from hosting.com.
Here are the specifics:
- Every time a new client signs up, several features on the control panel don’t work, like directory browsing. I have to call and have them fix it. This seems like a setup script issue, and I’ve notified them, but it’s not fixed.
- Database time and server time are off.
- I’m noticing that in some cases PHP Session variables are overwritten by global variables. A serious systematic problem that poses security threat. This a problem with hosting.com’s installation of PHP, not PHP itself.
- Their PHP installation does not parse ISO characters properly. It was fixed only after I asked them about it.
- They stopped supporting on-click WordPress install, which is fine for people like me but not for many others.
- Tech support wait time has increased.
- The features and capacity are dismal when you consider the above-average price, faulty setups, and security holes.
I don’t mind paying above average for good service. I also don’t mind having troubles for cheap products. However, hosting.com is sub-par quality at above-average price. Stay away.
New Website: 4mmGames.com
July 21st, 2010Last month I launched a new version of 4mmgames.com. It existed previously as a flash-based site, but since iPhones and mobile devices do not display flash content, the client decided to overhaul the site. I used Ariel Flesler’s SerialScroll for the transition effect between the pages (see it on 4mm website!). The deliverables included content management and mobile device compatibility.
4mm Games Home Page
4mm provided the design and the graphics. The trickiest part of the site was making the foreground and background slide independently. The next trickiest was always centering the content and the background, even when the window is resized.
The sliding inspiration came from Carrot Creative, which also uses the SerialScroll library for its website. Figuring out the independent scrolling of foreground vs. background, however, was all experience and brain power.
Dzineblog compiled a list of websites that use horizontal scrolling as a design theme. Perhaps this will inspire your creative juice.
Now I’m almost done with another overhaul of a flash-based website, this time for an art gallery. Seems like flash is going by the wayside…
A relatively new website and other news
April 20th, 2010Vivienne Koorland’s website launched in the beginning of this year. She’s an artist from South Africa who now resides in NYC. Adelheid Christian-Zechner designed and I coded.
Vivienne Koorland's Home Page
Vivienne Koorland Portfolio Page
The simple, clean design focuses the viewer’s attention on the artist’s work. The transition effects were implemented with the prototype/scriptaculous library. Most of the work went into the content management, which I will not show here. I came under budget and so gave the client a discount. Hurray!
On another front, a jazz guitarist Michael Bocian released a new album and asked for a slightly different look for his webpage. (Here is how it looked before). The top banner’s color gives a brighter vibe, and upon initial loading, the new CD’s release is highlighted for emphasis.
Michael Bocian's New Home Page
The picture is blurry for my eyes but Michael wanted it there… who’s to argue with the client?
Lastly, I’m overhauling the website for Peace Action New York State, a non-profit where I’m interning but has a site that needs a serious upgrade. The whole thing will be re-done using WordPress. I’m learning a lot about customizing WordPress; it’s super fun and can’t wait to show it off once it’s done.
New Website: MSK Design Group
December 16th, 2009I recently launched a simple, clean website that showcases MSK’s interior design work. The site combines jQuery SerialScroll by Ariel Flesler with jQueryUI library for the image scrolling.
MSK Home Page
Sitemaps
August 24th, 2009Some useful tools for intermediate-level LAMP developers: A compilation of sitemap generaters on google code, along with platform/language and cost.
I started testing Simple Sitemaps — a free PHP script that generates sitemap in XML, RSS, and based on a txt file. So you can use PHP to generate the txt file and call the PHP script to generate everything in one shot. Obviously if you can generate such .txt file you may as well jump right to creating the sitemap, but why reinvent the wheel? The advantage of using .txt to generate sitemap seems to be that the process of gathering site data can run by a different scripting language than the one that generated it.
I tweaked around with it to generate this HTML sitemap for my site. This is purely optional for a small site like mine, but it was a good exercise anyway. The package out of the box generates a php file (from the main PHP script) that simply ouptuts the RSS, which seems superflous. Changing the PHP code to output an XML file is easy.
Seems to be a good addition to my home-made CMS.
Two New Websites! – CFD27.com and MichaelBocian.com
July 31st, 2009This week I launched two websites.
First is www.cfd27.com, a silk floral store in the Chelsea district of NYC. This site went through quite a few iterations of change in design and content. It was my first project in delivering a site with customizable color-theme, which is a great idea considering the color palette of a floral store changes by the season. Unlike my previous project, this one had no issue with servers because the client signed up with the hosting service that I recommended (and one that I use), hostmysite.com (see my recent rant re hosting.com). Also to be thanked is the creator of lightbox2 Lokesh Dhakar for the nifty javascript in displaying images. I was more than happy to donate a small sum for having used it in this project.
CFD27 Home Page
The second project, just launched today, is an amazing jazz guitarist Michael Bocian’s website: www.michaelbocian.com. Although I’m the least qualified person to comment on musical taste, I know great music when I hear one, so to make Michael’s website was quite a joy. Plus, I learned a thing or two about MP3s, as well as how to collaborate closely with a creative man.
Michael Bocian's Official Website
Playing off the guitar theme, the strings light up as you hover over the menu items on the left. I struggled to find an elegant solution to extending the strings to the bottom of the window. It works great in Firefox, but in IE I had to use a kludge in the end. The advantage of using well-formed HTML & CSS, as in this case, is that it works even in Safari 1.3!
Web Development Writing
July 16th, 2009Whoa, I must have been on hiatus from the webdev world too long… Digital Web Magazine closed its doors back in March and I just found out. Even though it’s sad to see a quality site go, I suppose keeping up such a site without a steady source of revenue run by volunteers is a difficult proposition. I really hope that AListApart doesn’t do the same. These sites don’t offer in-depth coverage of any certain topic or the detail how-to of the latest trend; instead the articles tend to be generalized, with broad strokes, aimed to argue the finer points about web development and offer a broader perspective. Quality writing in web development is hard to come by, as most websites simply offer up chunks of code without any consideration to best practices. Most of the latest information is mired in discussion forums that is too difficult to decipher unless you’re actively involved in the thread. (I recently tried to make sense of this forum but gave up half way.) I suppose this is good for book selling… except that books are not as user-friendly when it comes to programming.
Other sites I find helpful are evolt and sitepoint. All these sites have too many awesome contributors who also run their own sites with tons of information, but with increasing amount of info, organization like this is sorely needed.
New site launched – AENA
June 26th, 2009A project of mine launched today: www.aenac.com. It was in collaboration with Adelheid at CZA Design. She does the design, I do the coding.
A Page from AENA
We had quite a difficult time with the client’s hosting service. The original hosting company ran PHP4 by default, which was okay because you can let it run PHP5 by using .htaccess file. Also their idea of preventing directory listing was to put a blank index.htm file into every directory… that’s just wrongheaded. The biggest problem was that MySQLi was not supported, so I gave the client an option of editing my code, but they found a new hosting company. With the new one, something was screwy with the FTP connection, which kept dropping connection on me. After providing them log files, screenshots, etc, the support gave me the following ultimatum:
It might be the issue with the network connection which you have used. Hence, I suggest that you to try to use different network connection and try to connect the FTP in different computer.
Also, please make sure to disable the firewall connection and disable the antivirus and try to upload the files again from your end. Please let me know if the issue persists.
Hmm, if I have no problem connecting to 5 other hosting services, why would this be my problem? Why would I ever want to disable my firewall and antivirus? Thankfully they had a decent file manager through their control panel, so the problem was averted, but using FTP is so much easier.
I always recommend my hosting company Hostmysite.com even though I get no kickbacks from them (unlike people who recommend DreamHost…) and it’s not the cheapest service around. Their support is awesome – a real person picks up the phone when you call support! No navigating through the maze of phone system. It’s a cliche but so true — you get what you pay for.
Anyway, enough of my gripe. In the end it worked out; glad to have it live.
Update August 2010 — Ever since hostmysite.com was purchased by hosting.com, the quality has deteriorated drastically. I no longer recommend it and is considering moving my hosting elsewhere.
Synching for Firefox browser users
January 29th, 2010A piece of good news for owners of multiple computers (who doesn’t these days?) and have resorted to Google Bookmark (or given up bookmarks all together?) because of synching problem. I haven’t found a good alternative to Google Bookmark, which is not a stellar product either but so far the best solution to across-browser/across-computer synching problem. If you use the web on your mobile heavily, Google Bookmarks is particularly a bad solution.
Firefox Weave lets you synch them and other settings in a breeze. Read about Weave Sync on Mozilla website. You can also read more about a nice overview of the ins/outs of Weave on Webmonkey’s blog.
As for add-on synching, it almost sounds like a dangerous idea if it installs new add-ons for you onto your computers, instead of merely upkeeping settings and versions… but I’m sure they’ll figure it out.
I’ve been working on a brand new website for an artist. It’s almost done and I’m looking forward to launching it.
Tags: bookmarks, commentary, firefox, news
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