web

I have read rumors that certain shared web hosting providers assign more than 1,000 users to each of their servers. This implies that the servers will be grossly overworked and the service will be slow. However, you never really know what you're going to get with a new host, because such numbers are never published. You won't see the sales pages for Godaddy and Dreamhost list service descriptions as One 8-core Opteron processor, 16GB memory and one 2TB hard drive with 2,000 user accounts per server. Unfortunately you won't find anything like that on AN Hosting's pages either, but I did a little sleuthing and have more details for you.   read more >>

The idea of bookmarklets is so simple that I suspect many people use them without realizing it. A bookmarklet is basically just a specially-crafted bookmark for your browser which performs special tasks. This can mean performing custom actions on the current page or generally improving your web browsing experience.

Technically, bookmarklets are short snippets of Javascript code which can do just about anything. They've been around for a long time, but I've only been using them a few years. With the increasing prevalence of cloud products and services, I expect their usage will only increase. Bookmarklets make it easier for you to do everything you need to with just a web browser. As such, I'm keeping a list of the most useful.   read more >>

AN Hosting recently relocated to a Seattle datacenter. As part of this process, my site is now running on a much more modern server (AMD Opteron 6100-series Magny Cours vs. Intel Xeon 5400-series Harpertown).

Unfortunately, a new server and new install can mean software changes. AN Hosting has tightened up the security settings on PHP. Better security is always a good thing, but it means the Drupal command line utility drush no longer works out of the box. (For those that don't know drush - please give it a chance. It provides near foolproof Drupal core/module/theme upgrades as well as command-line control of your Drupal sites.)   read more >>

For administrators and power users, it's often useful to log in as multiple users on the same web site. However, you can't normally do this from one web browser - sites keep track of your whole session. Logging in as one user logs you out as the other user.

An obvious, but bulky, solution is to use one web browser for each log in (e.g. Firefox and Chrome). However, I've found that Google Chrome's "incognito" feature works much better.   read more >>

Web browsers have had bookmark bars for years, but I never used them until I switched to Google Chrome. I've always felt that the amount of screen real estate they consume is too great compared to the number of bookmarks that will fit (and I dislike having all my bookmarks in folders).

Google Chrome Bookmark Bar

What made me change my mind was icon-only bookmarks. When adding a new bookmark in Chrome, delete the Name field - leaving it empty. Chrome will insert the bookmark using the favicon provided by the website. As long as these icons are distinct, you end up with a compact bookmark bar.

I've been curious about QR codes for quite a while. They certainly seem like an interesting method for distributing data, but are also simple enough for people to do creative things with them. You'll see them popping up more and more - on ads, in videos, random t-shirts, etc. I fear I've spent too much time brainstorming unique QR codes...

I don't know that animated QR codes will ever be particularly practical, but it seemed like an interesting experiment. One of the simplest examples is a simple QR code clock which updates once a second.   read more >>

Google, Eyebeam and Fast Company are hosting a data visualization challenge:

Every year, Americans fill out income tax forms and make a payment to the IRS. It’s an important civic duty, but it is also a lot of money. Where does it all go? Using data provided by WhatWePayFor.com, we challenge you to create a data visualization that will make it easier for U.S. citizens to understand how the government spends our tax money.

When I learned about the visualization challenge, I'll admit I didn't actually know many hard facts about government spending. I knew the military and national defense were huge expenditures, but wouldn't have been able to accurately place them in relation to other large expenses, such as social security.

I decided my level of knowledge would likely be similar to that of potential visitors, so I used that as a strength. Building a tool which helps me better understand the budget should be equally useful to others.   read more >>

I've been enjoying Pandora Radio for several years. It has been a great way to discover new artists and even new genres of music. I doubt I'd ever have learned of the existence of Dubsteb without Pandora - see my Music, Movie and Book Recommendations page to hear samples of my latest discoveries.

However, the web client was built on Adobe Flash, which makes it a bit of a CPU hog. I've long known that playing Pandora used up a lot more CPU time than playing other music (roughly 50% of the CPU for Pandora vs ~1% of the CPU for an MP3 or OGG). Thankfully, I have found a way to reduce the CPU load considerably.   read more >>

I have been using AN Hosting since November 2010 to host this Drupal site. Finding a responsible shared hosting provider was certainly not an easy task. There are a staggering number of hosts available, along with a huge number of rather questionable "review" websites. I was forced to come up with a list of hosting providers that seemed decent and then individually research them one-by-one. I'm hoping that my experience and real-world performance/uptime report will be useful to others.

This post was last updated 2011-11-20   read more >>

Yesterday, I decided to take the plunge and switch 6by9.net to Google Apps. I'd been mulling it over for a while, mostly because I was worried about the hassle and headaches associated with transferring all my settings and data. Just a day later, it's almost completely done and I'm very pleased.

The biggest change is that now all my mail is handled by Google's GMail. But it also means that I have almost all of Google's services associated with 6by9.net, including Analytics, Calendar, Docs, Google Voice, Reader, etc. I made the decision that it would be more efficient to stop running my own mail server and spam filters when there was a much more efficient service available for free. Additionally, I no longer have to worry about multiple accounts - one for 6by9.net and one for Google's services.   read more >>