Spicer Matthews

long time ago I went to a linux user group (plug) and there was a fresh new company giving a presentation on this way cool new technology called User Mode Linux or UML. They created this company using virtualization to offer dedicated hosting to users. More or less having many different instances of Linux operating systems all running on one server. Each instance is owned and operated by a different customer. I was so taken in by this idea I became a customer right way. I was a customer for many years as a matter of fact. However I was never really that happy with it. Just seemed to be slow and sluggish. So I finally left and went on to a Mac Mini hosting which was interesting but owning the hardware and having “remove hands” just annoyed me. So I moved to shared hosting. Well that just sucked!!! So I started to get interested in these VPS dedicated hosting company. Thinking that maybe UML has gotten better with time. I found out the UML is a thing of the past and is now been taken over by Xen and all these VPS hosting companies are using Xen which seems to be way faster! So I thought I would give it a try. I looked at all the companies and concluded that SliceHost and Linode were the two best companies on the market.

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As someone that looks over many different websites one of the tools I have used is Google Analytics. Google Analytics using some javascript that you install on your website to send traffic data back to Google. Then you can log into their website and view data about your traffic. This data consists of visitors, page views, visitor location, and so on. There are hundreds of tools out there for this purpose but Google Analytics really stepped up as the best free option. My only problem with Google Analytics is you have no control over how it works. You do not have direct access to the data, and the data is not processed in real time. While I continue to think there is nothing better out there for free I have recently stumbled upon an amazing open source project called PiWik.

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The type of web programing I do often has a large database back-end with which requires user input and data return. In the olden days you just created an html form and then posted some input data to some cgi (say PHP script) and the script would speak with the database and return some html causing the browser to reload on post. Now that we are a super cool web 2.0 world we do not do this anymore we make javascript use Ajax to do the post for us. If you are anything like me you take one look at javascript and say “no thank you”. Most people hate the syntax of javascript, the confusion of the language, or the browser compatibility issues; when I say most people I am including me. This is where our friends at Jquery come to the rescue http://jquery.com (more on them in another post).

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