Okay, so this is a bit of a shameless plug — oh godammit. PLUG. I said shameless PLUG. That’s it, I’m firing my image editor.

Anyway, this is just a quickie post to let you know that I’ve brought TehAwesome.Net back online, with a slightly different style and purpose. It was always meant to be a collection of what I consider the very best things, but it was a lot of work compiling long, comprehensive write-ups, and Snipe.Net was suffering for it.

I’ve changed gears a little. While it will include all of my favorite things, the write-ups will be shorter, focusing on only one bit of awesome at a time, which will make it easier for me to provide lots of fresh content for you, without taking too much time away from the much more verbose and detailed posts you’ll continue to find here.

I find so much cool stuff while poking around online, and while I post it to Twitter, if you missed it there, there’s a good chance you won’t see it, and this stuff is just too good to miss. This gives me a place to collect it, and add an occasional tidbit of snark when my muse inspires me.

As per my MO, the content posted there will be geeky, funny, science-y, and occasionally NSFW. You have been warned.

So that’s really it. I hope you’ll stop by and check it out, subscribe to the RSS, and leave comments where you deem appropriate. I do love hearing from you all.

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This is just a quickie to let you know that I haven’t been receiving notifications from Disqus about new comments pending approval. This is my own fault for reasons I’ll explain, but I’m working on replying to them all now.

I had a problem with Disqus when I was out of town for the Microsoft Web Developers Summit in early December.

My autoresponder was automatically approving new comments, and posting my autoresponse message to the thread comments, making quite a mess of things. I had tried to set up a rule to bypass my autoresponder, deleting emails from Disqus. This plan didn’t actually fix the problem, so I ended up deleting my autoresponder, but I forgot to delete the rule automatically nuking emails sent from Disqus.

Thus, I just randomly logged into Discus and found about 100 comments pending approval. I’m very sorry for this mixup, and I’m working on replying to all of the comments that require a reply one by one, but please be patient.

I’ve deleted the rule in my email, so new comments should be approved and replied to quickly from here on out, but I’m a big dork for not remembering to delete the Disqus rule sooner. My bad.

Funnily, I thought things had been awfully quiet around here, and started to think that my blog posts were sucking more than usual since no one was commenting on them. Glad to see that’s not the case.

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Hey, just a quick note to apologize if I’ve flooded your RSS feed reader with older posts that pretended to be new today. I was trying to set my feeds to show the entire story instead of the short excerpt they currently display in RSS readers, but ran into a bit of an issue.

But Why?

This is actually something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. I don’t advertise on the site, so it’s not as if I’d be losing out on advertising revenue by giving you the entire article in one shot. I myself prefer RSS feeds that give me the goods, so it only seems fair I do unto others.

Strangely, what should have been a simple setting change in WordPress ended up being a bit of a convoluted pain in the ass. I’m noting it here, in case anyone else has the same trouble. If you don’t, you can skip the rest of this post and go back to your regularly scheduled porn.

WordPress and Feedburner Hate Me

Normally, if you want to change whether your WordPress feed displays a summary or full-text, it’s as simple as going to SETTINGS > READING in your WordPress admin and changing the setting.

For some reason, this didn’t work for me – the feed still showed only post summaries. I cleared my WP-Supercache. Still only summaries.

When I tried using the RSS2 url, and updating that in Feedburner, Feedburner threw an error telling me my feed was over 512k, which is the limit for their source feed size. Thing is, it wasn’t. Not even close. Not even with my long-winded, rambling posts. My limit for the maximum number of posts to display in a feed was 10. Upon seeing that error, I reduced it to 5, for shits and giggles, even though I knew the 10-post feed was well below 512k. Then I tried 3. Then 2. No matter what, Feedburner insisted my feed was over 512k.

Strangely – and I admit I haven’t delved deep into the core code for WordPress in a while, so this may be expected behavior – when I use /feed/rss/, the feed header returns as expected and the feed source displays in Web-Sniffer (although it’s still limited to only summaries). When I use /feed/rss2/, Web-Sniffer tells me that it’s 301 redirecting back to /feed/. When I use /feed/atom/, it displays the full-length feeds as expected.

Without boring you with the painfully detailed process by which I figured this out, the solution ended up being to use the WordPress atom feed as the source url. I have no idea why this works, or what is ailing Feedburner, but there you have it. So, atom it is.

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If you’re following me on Twitter, or if you’re thinking about following me on Twitter, here’s some stuff you should probably know.

Although it may sound like I’m trying to convince you not to follow me, that’s not the case at all. I’d absolutely love to have you! I just want you to know how I roll so I don’t have to suffer the heartbreak of your unfollow, and I don’t have to go through the hassle of finding out where you live so I can leave flaming bags of dog shit on your doorstep.

I tweet a lot. Hopefully you actually looked at my Twitter page before following, so this won’t come as a huge surprise to you, but just in case, I’m warning you now. I tweet a lot. I joined Twitter in March of 2008, and have over 50k updates as of July 2010. Each one is a shining gem of wisdom, of course, but – yeah – I tweet a lot.

I don’t always tweet about industry stuff. While it’s not at all uncommon to find me discussing web development, PHP, Facebook Application design, CSS, XML, the Amazon API, or any number of industry-related things, that makes up about 10% of what I talk about. So if you’re looking to follow me solely because I’m in the same industry as you, this might not be a good fit. That said, please always feel free to ask industry-related questions. If I know the answer, I’ll help – and if I don’t, I may very well know someone who does. You don’t even have to follow me if you just have a question or two.

I am NOT safe for work. Most of the time, anyway. I swear a lot, and tweet in hyperbole a lot. I will usually warn you if a link I have posted is NSFW, but my general day to day conversation tends not to be.  Don’t believe me? See for yourself. As of this posting, I am ranked 1,347 wordwide for swearing via Cursebird. (Go me!)

I’m really, really sarcastic. If you ever read something and you’re not sure whether I’m actually that much of an asshole, or are just being sarcastic, there’s a good chance I’m just being snarky. Usually.

I sometimes get a little silly. Okay, a lot silly. It doesn’t usually last as long as the #giantblueglowingcock debacle, but in between the swearing and the industry chat and cranky haikus, some silliness will invariably arise.

I don’t have a lot of patience for people who consider themselves gurus, and if you ever ask me about my personal brand, I will stop what I’m doing specifically to invent the technology that will let me stab you in the face over the internet. I work for an ad agency, so my marketing bullshit tolerance is worn pretty thin. And god help you if you use the word “synergy” in a tweet to me and mean it.

If you only ever tweet about using Twitter, I will probably unfollow you. If that’s really all you bring to the table, there’s not much to discuss. I once saw someone with the title “Twitter Coach” in their Twitter bio, and actually threw up a little in my mouth. Anyone who needs a “Twitter coach” is too stupid to use Twitter. Period. 140 chars. Don’t be a dick. There, now I’m a Twitter coach too.

So that’s what you should know about following me on Twitter. If you do decide to follow (or keep following), please send me an @reply letting me know how you found me and why you decided to follow. And if you think I’m teh funny, or at teh clever, considering throwing a vote in for my tweets at Threadless.

For more about me and some of the goofy things I create, check out my about page.

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I was fortunate enough to spend last week in a beautiful little country in Central America called Belize. Like many people, I didn’t know much about Belize before I went, and wasn’t sure what to expect. After spending an amazing week there, I wanted to share my experiences with you, so that you’ll have some ideas of what to do and where to go if you decide to visit.

I’ll try to be as specific as possible, detailing the names of people we met, places we went, and the companies we used for tourist activities. By no means are these your only options. You could go back to Belize 100 times and always find something new to do, and a different tour company to take you there – but we had such positive experiences, I want to make sure you have specifics in case you want to use the same folks we did.

If you’re considering traveling to Belize, you’ll probably want to get right to the “what to do, what to see” parts of this article – but I believe you should know a bit about a country before you go in and start stinking up the joint, so I’m going to give you a brief Social Studies class on it first. I’ll make it quick, and try to keep it interesting, I promise. Their history and culture is fascinating and I could write a book on it, but I’ll try to give you the cliff notes version. In the meantime, check out some of the photos of Belize we took on Flickr.

In part two of this series, you’ll get a special treat. Not only will I go through our experiences (including specific places to go and things to do), you’ll get the additional commentary of my better half, Lars. We’ll be doing a sort of dual-post, with his comments featured inline with mine. While Lars and I are two-peas-in-a-pod, our perspectives can be very different, and you’ll get both sides. For example, I don’t care that much about food and love the ocean and scuba diving, whereas he is a major foodie and doesn’t much care for the ocean. That said, trying to get two busy artists to collaborate can sometimes be like herding cats, so it may take another day or two for part two to come out. Part one is designed to help you decide whether Belize is the kind of place you might like to visit, and part two will be helpful to you once you’ve decided that it is.

Overview

Belize, formerly known as British Honduras, was once part of the Mayan (and very briefly the Spanish) Empire, and it was most recently affiliated with the British Empire prior to gaining its independence in 1981. It is located in the Western Caribbean just below the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. Guatemala borders Belize from the west and Mexico from the north. Belize is approximately 8,866 square miles. Its mainland is approximately 180 miles long and up to 68 miles wide. Belize has the second longest barrier reef in the world (165 miles long.)

The main industry for Belize is tourism, due to their lush jungles, gorgeous beaches and amazing scuba diving and snorkeling. They also grow sugar cane and oranges (which they export to the United States), and assorted other tropical fruits and nuts. Oil was recently discovered in Belize as well, but it remains to be seen how much of an impact on the economy that will have.

It should be noted that although tourism is a primary industry for them, no part of Belize feels plastic or “touristy”. Even San Pedro, which is the main tourist town in Belize, has a relaxed, genuine feel to it. Of course you’ll see resorts and bars that cater to tourists (and are therefore a bit more expensive), the atmosphere doesn’t feel manufactured in any way.

Languages

The official language is English, although Spanish and Kriol are spoken throughout the entire country as well. The fact that most locals speak English makes it a comfortable option for visitors who want to get to know Central America but may be less comfortable with going to a developing country where they don’t speak the language.

Belizean Kriol, or simply known as Kriol by its speakers, is an English Creole most closely related to Miskito Coastal Creole, but also Limón Coastal Creole, Colón Creole, and San Andrés and Providencia Creole. Kriol was historically spoken by the Kriols, a population of mainly African and British ancestry. However, most Belizean Garifunas, Mestizos, Maya, and other ethnic groups speak Kriol as at least a second language, and it is the only true common language among all groups.

For lack of a more technical explanation, Belizean Kriol is sort of an English shorthand, with some Spanish words occasionally thrown in. Belizean children are taught Spanish and Kriol as children, and they learn English in school. It is absolutely beautiful, comes in a variety of dialects, and is primarily a spoken language. An example of what Kriol sounds like:

What is your name?
(mesolect) /Waat da yu neim?//;
(basilect) /Hau yu neim?//;  /Weh yu neim?//

Belizean Kriol is different than the Kriol you will hear in other parts of the Caribbean, and is also different from Louisiana Creole. For more on Kriol, be sure to check out the Wikipedia article. Kriol is hard to learn, and despite my best efforts, I can only understand a small percentage of if when I hear it spoken – and wouldn’t dare embarrass myself by trying to speak it. I’m enough of a gringa when I try to speak Spanish.

San Pedro

I spent most of my time in San Pedro, on Ambergris Caye, a small island off the mainland of Belize. “Caye” is pronounced “key”, and they use the play on words frequently – every restaurant offers “caye lime pie” on the dessert menu. The island is called Ambergris Caye, and the major town on Ambergris is San Pedro. As it was explained to me, the tourists call it Ambergris Caye, the locals call it San Pedro. San Pedro started off as a fishing village, but once the tourist industry began to pick up, many fisherman turned in their tackle boxes and nets for scuba tanks and fins.

Ambergris Caye was named after ambergris, a solid, waxy, flammable substance of a dull gray or blackish color produced in the digestive system of sperm whales (whale vomit). The ambergris used to wash up on the shore of the island, where it would be collected and sold to companies to make perfumes. (Most perfumes no longer use ambergris, and have replaced it with synthetic fixatives.) How would you like to live on an island named after whale puke?

San Pedro is a friendly, clean town with just about all of the amenities a tourist could want. The town is a picture postcard setting – small colorfully painted houses set alongside sand streets nestled beside the clear turquoise sea. Coconut palms sway and rustle in the gentle cooling trade winds. Low rise hotels, guest houses and bungalow style resorts, from modest to magnificent, are nestled along the coast and throughout the town.

There are only a few main streets in San Pedro, and most of your traveling will be done by golf cart, on foot or by taxi. It’s actually strange to get used to – the number of golf carts on the cobbled roads vastly outnumbers any other vehicle, with minivan taxis coming in a distant second. Only rarely will you see a larger vehicle like a truck or SUV. Filtered water is distributed around the town by a John Deere tractor hauling a small trailer stacked high with office-cooler style water jugs. My group rented a golf cart for the week (about $250 US for the whole week), but taxis are never hard to find. When traveling around San Pedro, every taxi trip seems to cost $10 BZ ($5 US), no matter how near or far you are.

Speaking of water – one question I’m sure many potential visitors are curious about is whether or not you can drink the water in Belize. Having spent a very uncomfortable week in the Yucatan years ago, sick in ways I don’t care to think much about in any level of detail from just brushing my teeth with the local water, this was a major concern of mine. There is a water filtration facility in San Pedro, so tap water on Ambergris Caye is safe to drink.

My understanding from the locals is that once you go inland, you’ll want to stick to bottled water, of which there is plenty. Every roadside grocery store and restaurant, no matter how small and remote, offers bottled water for sale.

San Pedro is only a fraction of the overall country, and we did get a chance to head inland, through Cayo and San Ignacio on our way to explore Xunantunich (shoo-NAHN-too-nich), the ancient Mayan ruins, about 5 miles from the Guatemalan border.

When you first arrive in Belize, you’ll probably fly into Belize City. Traveling to and from the mainland, you can take a water taxi, or a prop plane (the airline is Tropic Air) to get to Belize City from San Pedro and back. My recommendation would be the prop plane – it’s slightly more expensive than the water taxi, but traveling to the mainland by water taxi can take up to two hours, while the prop plan is a 17 minute flight with a gorgeous view of the cayes.

Heading out to Xunantunich, we took the prop plane to Belize City, where our tour guide (who was outstanding – more on that in part two) picked us up and loaded us into a van. From there, we took the Western Highway, which you can see on the map above, straight across the country westward. We passed through Cayo, which is one of the major argicultural regions of Belize, where we saw orange groves, cashew trees, and the foot of the Maya Mountains. The Maya Mountains are the mountain range that extends through Central and South America, although the name changes to the Andes mountains once they reach South America.

People

I have traveled fairly extensively throughout the Caribbean and Mexico, and spent some time in Europe. I can say without a doubt that in my experience, the people of Belize are the warmest, most gentle and kind people I have ever met anywhere in the world.

This article attempts to give you an overview of the culture and some things to do, but the real take-away I want all readers to have is that despite all of the beautiful scenery and exciting things to do, the people of Belize are what impressed me the most.

The people of Belize range from those of Caribbean descent, with very dark skin and heavy Kriol accents to those of Mexican and Guatemalan descent, with lighter skin and more Latin American features. One of the beach vendors was selling a blanket that I wish I could have bought (I didn’t have any cash on me) that was a hand-embroidered blanket, about 3′x4′, that showed rows and rows of people meant to represent the people of Belize. What struck me as so lovely about this blanket is the wonderful variety of skin tones on the small, embroidered faces.

In many of the other places I have traveled, specifically those in developing areas where the tourist industry is prominent, I have often gotten the subtle feeling of “we’re glad you’re money is here, but we wish you weren’t.” It’s hard to explain, and I mean no disrespect to any of the other Caribbean areas. It felt like they had come to terms with the fact that tourists were necessary, and they did their best to put up with us and make our stay nice. Don’t misunderstand me – the people elsewhere have always been very nice, but I often felt there was a sense of genuine warmth that was missing. (And frankly, being a New Yorker, I am absolutely guilty of that myself, so I can’t really point fingers.)

In Belize, the feeling you get is completely different. There is a warmth and kindness to the Belizean people that I have never experienced before. Everyone you pass on the street will say hello, ask you how you’re doing, and give you a warm smile. I have never felt more welcome anywhere in the world.

While staying in San Pedro, we stayed for one night at a resort called Banana Beach (which I highly recommend, although it is not cheap. More on that in part two, though.) While there, we ate dinner at the restaurant in the hotel, and befriended a waiter there, named MC.

MC was born in Belize, and has dark black skin, dark eyes and an infectious white smile, which he shows off frequently due to his lighthearted sense of humor and positive outlook. One night after the dining area closed and his shift was done, he joined me and a family of Canadians I had met on the trip for a few drinks. He explained to me in his thick Kriol accent that he doesn’t consider his job to be just that of a waiter. He is a representative of the Belize people, and it is important to him that everyone who visits Belize feel welcome and safe and to learn what a wonderful place it is. In fact, after almost every shift, MC could be found talking to the tourists, answering questions and making them smile.

The sense of pride in the people of Belize is remarkable. It is entirely common to see the people of San Pedro wearing “San Pedro” shirts – something only tourists might do in other countries. Belizeans are proud to be Belizean and that pride is easy to recognize. The locals can be seen dutifully sweeping the porches and sidewalks of their homes every morning, and even if they don’t have much, they have pride in what they have. I think Americans could take a lesson or two from the Belizeans.

Crime and Safety

Unlike many other places I have visited, San Pedro felt very safe – and the parts that were less safe were pretty obvious. Because tourism is their main industry, crimes against tourists are not common, but naturally you’ll want to use common sense as well. I can say that I was walking around San Pedro as late as 3AM, and never once felt uncomfortable or unsafe. At no point on my trip did I (or my compatriots, some of which were less used to places like New York City) feel uneasy.

When to Visit

The climate in Belize is tropical, and the locals tell me that February is one of the best months to visit.  The weather is warm and humid most of the time, but I’m told that October is the one month you do not want to be in Belize if you can help it. October is their hurricane season, and weather can be unpredictable and unpleasant.

An Important Note

BRING BUG SPRAY. No foolin’. I am one of those people that WILL get bit if there is a mosquito within 100 miles of me, and although I was usually diligent with the bug spray, the few nights I forgot to spray my feet caught up with me. My feet and lower legs are covered in mosquito bites. Then again, Lars didn’t use bug spray, and didn’t get a single bite, so I think it largely depends on the person.

If you’re not prone to mosquito bites, you may want to bring bug spray anyway, to combat the sand fleas. You won’t run into sand fleas if you’re just beach-bumming it, but they cluster around the piles of seaweed that wash up on shore, so if you’re going for a beachside stroll, its better to be safe than sorry.

Before you leave for your trip, you may also want to take precautions and begin anti-malaria treatment, which is as simple as taking quinine for a few weeks before your trip.

That’s it for now – so much more to come later, I promise! We just got back at 2AM this morning, so we’re still sortin through notes. There’s so much to tell and share!

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I am in the process of migrating all 200 domain names (approximately 100 websites) on my server over to Mosso – which is why you would have gotten a 404 if you happened on the site for a short time last night. (.htaccess did not transfer correctly, so mod_rewrites were borked.) Sorry for any inconvenience – was my fault, not Mosso’s.

I have had my own dedicated machine, hosted in a colo in San Diego, for several years, and dedicated managed servers prior to that. While I enjoy the flexibility that running your own box allows, I just don’t have the time or interest in being a sysadmin, and I feel it is unwise for me to do a half-assed job at something I hate in a role that is as important as that. Until recently, moving all of those sites to any kind of shared hosting environment would have meant a steep increase in what I pay per month. With Mosso, I’ll be paying around $100 a month, $65 less than I pay now, assuming I don’t go over bandwidth.

I apologize in advance for how ranty this post is about to get. I realize some of you may have just come here to find out if Mosso would be a good match for you. I’ll explain more about my experience with them in a moment, but I have to get this off my chest first.

I’m tired of being treated like a moron

I haven’t done a shared hosting solution in years now, partly because its been cost prohibitive if you have more than a handful of websites, and partly because I got tired of being treated like a moron every time I had to talk to support. Just yesterday, I was on the phone with Lunarpages, on behalf of a friend. (My friend doesn’t know much about servers. His website had been compromised, so I offered to be the middleman between him and tech. I have NOTHING to do with his website – was just stepping in here.)

This is what I sent Lunarpages support:

We recently experienced a script exploit on the domain name example.com. John Smith, the account holder, is copied on this message, as I am helping him try to find the source of the problem.

While we’re still trying to isolate the origin of the vulnerability, in viewing the FTP logs, we see several IP addresses that seem suspicious – several of these IP addresses track back to Russia and China.

The exploit allowed hundreds of randomly named index files to be created in directories with 755 permissions, owned by and belonging to the <groupname> group. Additionally, existing HTML files were edited to have a javascript appended to them containing links to hundreds of websites, all of which are reported as malicious websites. We can provide sample files that were generated, however the javascript that was inserted used randomly generated function names, so its nearly impossible to trace back via a google search.

The webroots of the malware sites seem to be normal websites, so it would seem that these sites are infected and unaware of it. The files appearing on their sites redirect to the intermediary site onlinedetect.com which then forwards to the malware site pro4scan.com:

http://google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?tpl=safari&site=www.onlinedetect.com&hl=en-us
http://google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?tpl=safari&site=www.pro4scan.com&hl=en-us

However, since the FTP logfiles are only accessible to us for 1 day, we are unable to view the apache and ftp logfiles for January 4, 2009, when the bogus files were created.

We have downloaded a recent backup of the site, however it would be great if we could access a backup from January 4th or 5th, as the 6th was the only day available. If possible, can you dump a backup from Jan 5 to the account root so we can download it by FTP.

We have already changed the login password to the FTP account, however since we are not 100% sure of what caused the exploit, if it is possible to set up a monitoring script on this account that will send a daily email of ftp login attempts and/or uploaded files, that would be extremely helpful. Not sure if you have something like that available.

We do not have many dynamic scripts set up on this account, however the one that could have potentially been the issue has been removed. If we had access to the log files from Jan 4, that would help us determine whether the exploit was done by way of passing malicious code via a GET or POST, which would help us rule out a few things.

We have set up a server monitor to alert us if the content of the affected pages changes more than 20%, but any assistance you can provide us with the above issues would be great.

Thank you very much for your assistance.

What I got in response was a form letter response telling me to change my password.

*blink*

Are you fucking kidding me?

First of all, I already told you I did that – second of all, did you even read beyond the first sentence? I am asking you for something – something only you can provide me. Don’t give me some bullshit form letter. You are support. Support me.

I haven’t had to deal with a retail virtual hosting company in a long time – I had hoped they had changed. Evidently, they have not.

So, yeah – anyway, the thought of returning to a hosting company rather than having my own server made me want to chew through my own wrists. But the thought of having issues (and there were a few, although mostly minor – maintaining a server requires work) that I’d have to tackle by myself, or with the help of a friend who had the skill but not the time was equally troubling.

Enter Mosso

A friend of mine in the PHP community had been talking to me about Mosso for a while, but I hadn’t really looked into it. The combination of a crappy economy, the fact that my Virtualmin license was about to expire (which was going to cost me a few hundred clams to renew), the fact that I no longer live in San Diego (which I deeply lament every day) and can’t just go down to the colo when I need to,  and frustration over not having the time to do some things that needed to be done on the server finally forced my hand and I started looking into it.

Mosso is a Rackspace company, so their legendary “fanatical support” is extended to Mosso clients as well. I have worked with Rackspace a lot in the past, so there is a comfort level there. Mosso is also geared at developers, which is nice for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that when I call them, they know I have a clue and treat me appropriately.

Using Mosso, I can create as many individual sites as I want, including some for clients with hosting billing packages built right in. Moss takes care of emailing them a billing reminder, accepting the payment, and then they transfer the money to you. There is a fraud-prevention hold period that prospective customers should be aware of – when the client pays their bill, you don’t see the money right away. Of course, you can always disable billing and ask your customers to send you a check or pay you directly through some other method if that’s an issue for you. For me, remembering to bill my hosting clients was where I really sucked, so this feature was a definite plus. Getting my money a month or two later – as opposed to never getting it because I forgot to bill them – is an okay plan to me. Plus it saves me the hassle of getting another merchant account, which just isn’t worth it for me for the limited number of paid hosting clients I have on the account.

I chatted with some of the guys from Mosso on Twitter for a few weeks, and perhaps more importantly, I listened. I was watching how they interacted with customers, and what their customers were saying about them. I talked to friends who had made the switch, and pinged people I didn’t know who were using Mosso. This move is a BFD, and not a decision I could take lightly. I’d be moving around 5 very active and important websites with heavy customization and big fat databases, as well as a hundred smaller, less critical ones.

Finally we arranged a call. (I have never actually been given the option of spending a half hour on the phone with someone from a hosting company before buying in, so that it and of itself was new.) When the call was done, I had pretty much run out of reasons not to switch.

My two primary apprehensions were that Mosso does not support ssh, and that I didn’t know what my monthly bandwidth was for the box I’m currently on, so I couldn’t determine whether I would be in danger of going over straight out of the starting gate. Truthfully, the only times I usually need ssh are when something has gone wrong – I don’t use it that often, and Mosso does support SSHFs. As for bandwidth, I’m still not 100% sure on that end, but I talked to the fellow that handles my colo box and he said he didn’t think it went over 500GB per month, which is Mosso’s limit before they charge you extra. Most of the traffic on my server comes from my non-profit organization website, however, and Mosso will apparently comp bandwidth overages for the non-profit.

Sold – So what’s next?

So, I’ve been trying to migrate sites over, a few more every day. I have thirty-something moved over so far, but I’m taking it slowly so I don’t kill myself over it and don’t make mistakes. Its a lot of work, and being that I work full-time, commute 4.5 hours a day and run a non-profit, I’m beat by the time I get home.

So far, the migrations have been flawless. A few sites have had databases that were too large to import using phpmyadmin, but I just clicked on the “support > live chat” option in my admin, connected with a tech, and asked them to import it. Less than a minute later, it was done. It took longer to upload the sql dump than it did for the entire customer service experience. Moving this site took a little longer, just because of a larger database – but one of the other WordPress sites I host went over in literally 5 minutes or less, including the initial download of files from the old server. A few quick changes to the config file with new database credentials and it was done.

There are a few differences in their control panel compared to what I’m used to, some good, some not as good. Some usability stuff, which I’ll probably mention to them at some point but are not that big of a deal. Having a view-all option (or user configured preference for number returned) for clients or website listings, instead of 10 per page, would be stellar. When you have 200 domain names, that’s a lot of clicking. Their control panel is home grown, and a helluva lot more usable than many I’ve seen (SO much more user-friendly than cpanel or webmin), but it could use a little tweaking. Still one of the best I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a lot.

When you create an account in Mosso’s control panel, it automagically creates a top-level testing domain, which is a huge help. For example, immediately after I created the snipe.net domain in the Mosso control panel, the control panel gave me link to my testing url. Since it’s a sub-domain of one of theirs, it won’t break any “/” links or image paths you might have in the page, and you can kick the tires thoroughly before you pull the DNS trigger and switch things over.

They didn’t have an email migration script when I signed up, but one of their techs took it upon himself to write one. It’s in testing now. I have several email accounts with over 100k messages, and although I use imap, if there is an easier way than spending the next two weeks downloading my imap map and copying it over to the new imap account, I’d be really thrilled with that. And it looks like there is. So yay.

It’s early to tell yet, but I like what I’ve seen so far. Their support has been quick to respond and very helpful. Server speeds seem just fine, email is working as expected. Really, I don’t have any complaints. Of course, the paranoid side of me will keep my old server in colo for another month or two, just for the peace of mind that I can switch DNS back if I need to, but I’m not expecting to have to do that anytime soon.

If you’re interested in giving Mosso a shot, they offer a 30 day risk-free trial (money back guarantee) – and if you use the promotional code REF-SNIPE, you’ll get a $25 rebate/refund on your first month’s bill. If you’re still not sure or you have more questions, follow @mosso on twitter. They’re very responsive, and often quite funny.

While talking to them on Twitter before I signed on, I told @mosso, “You guys are like the Obama of website hosting. I’m excited about the possibilities but praying you don’t dick me over.”

So far, so good – for both

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Jan 8, 2009 Update: Most of the bugs are worked out – I still need to refine the comments a little more – they’re a bit blah at the moment, and I have to build in the threaded comment code. To those who have taken the time to let me know what they think of the design, thank you! Your feedback has been great!

Jan 6, 2009 Update: The redesign is live, although there are a few bugs that need to be worked out, specifically with the comments display. Commenter’s gravatars, website info and name are currently stacking incorrectly. This should be fixed in the next day or so, and it will not prevent you from commenting normally.

Original Post:
Snipe.Net is undergoing some structural and design changes over the next week or so. No content has been removed, so if you can’t find what you’re looking for, try using the search or using the updated categories at the top of the page.

I’m sorry for any inconvenience this may cause, and hopefully this type of thing shouldn’t have to happen again anytime soon.

Why the Category Changes?

I had created the main navigation when I had first resurrected the blog, and it wasn’t until some time had passed that I realized that although those categories were perfectly fine for older posts, the way I blog, and the things I blog about, have changed over time. Rather than trying to retro-fit new posts into categories that didn’t really make sense anymore, I decided to do the cleanup now, cram the older posts into the best fitting category, and move forward.

I’m also working on a new site design, which is what really solidified the fact that the categories I was previously using just didn’t sense anymore. While its still very much a work in progress, you can get a sneak peek at the new design. I’d love to hear any thoughts you might have on it.

New Layout

Why the Redesign?

Several people have asked me why I’m redesigning the site – “the current design is just fine”.  It is – but it’s not mine. The current blog theme is called Papercut, and is a commercial theme from a company called WooThemes (that does beautiful work.)  While its lovely, historically, snipe.net has always been designed by me – for better or for worse – so I have felt a little weird about using someone else’s design, even if I paid for it fair and square.

Plus, there were a few limitations to the design that always bothered me – I wanted a slightly wider content area, since many of my posts contain code. The new design should free up some space in the content so things aren’t quite so cramped.

I’ve had a bit of a dry spell from designing for a while. My day job is as a senior developer, not a designer, and at the company I work, I don’t get to do any design work at all. I sat down in front of Photoshop a few weeks ago and hit a groove. So, I’m in the process of slicing it up, writing the CSS and will be converting it into a WordPress theme soon so that I can make the switch.

With the new design will come a lot more free stuff of my own creation. I used to do that a lot on snipe.net, and I haven’t done it in a long time. I’m looking forward to it.

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So there is a meme going around the PHP community, and although I normally never participate in these things, I was tagged by two three people (enygma, vidyut and brandon savage) I would never have expected to have participated, so I decided not to be a fuddyduddy and play along. (Did I really just write the word “fuddyduddy”?)

Seven Things

1. I am deathly allergic to bees, and almost died from a yellowjacket attack when I was 7. I was walking along the railroad ties that lined my driveway, and my foot sank through into a yellowjacket nest.
2. I have had some pretty unusual jobs, before settling into web development. I have been a bartender at a strip joint, a bartender in a dive bar, a makeup artist for an erotic photographer/pornographer, leather carver, sculptor, illustrator, a broker on Wall Street and a club dancer, though not in that order. My first graphic design job was for one of those free home listing magazines, where I had to photo-correct, retouch and place photos of homes for sale into the magazine layout using Corel. The hard drive was so small on my machine that every few days, we had to dump everything because it would fill up. I offered to make the company owner a website for free as practice and to build my portfolio, and he declined, saying “the internet is a fad.”
3. I was in People Magazine in 2004.
4. I was epileptic growing up (petit mal), but have mostly grown out of it, although I do sometimes risk seizures if I don’t sleep for several days.
5. I worked with tigers for about a year and a half in Riverside, California. I was part of a team that took care of 56 big cats, including tigers, eleven leopards, one cougar and two lions. I miss them every day, and often find myself tempted to leave everything behind and go to Africa to work. Jane Goodall is my hero.
6. I am a blacksmith and a PADI certified advanced scuba diver, both of which I learned in Arizona. (Who gets scuba certified in Arizona??) I also used to be a bodybuilder, and would go to the gym twice a day.
7. When I worked on Wall Street, I used to have to dress up for work. One day, I went to the bathroom and didn’t realize that my skirt was tucked up into the back of my pantyhose, and walked through the entire boardroom with my ass exposed for the word to see. I didn’t notice until I was sitting down at my desk. So if you ever manage to catch me in a skirt and it looks like I touch the back of my skirt a lot, it’s not because I like my butt, its because I’m paranoid.

People I’m Tagging

• YatPundit – because I find him interesting and funny
• brlittle – because I will take any opportunity I can find to annoy him
• hipsterplease – because he’s awesome and hooks me up when I can’t find the nerdcore tracks I want
• sparkyfirepants – because I’ve only just met him and he seems interesting
• lotusberry – again, its an opportunity to annoy him
• johnnymags – because he’s fucking funny
• lomifeh – because I’ve known him forever

And here are the rules:

• Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

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I’m sure I’m going to hell for this (among many, many other reasons), but Ash Wednesday gives me the creeps. Walking through Port Authority and then the subway system seeing dozens of people shuffling to and fro with sloppy, smudged crosses on their heads and glazed eyes always seems to remind me of a zombie or vampire movie. I keep waiting for them to try and eat my brains.

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