The concept of the gravatar - the ‘globally recognized avatar’ - made sense a few years ago. With the advent of social blogging communities like MyBlogLogs, gravatars seem to be less in use (certainly less by our readers). So I’m switching from gravatars to MyAvatars, a Wordpress plugin that adds MyBlogLog avatars to comments.
Finding a good host can be tricky - there seem to be a lot of great deals out there, but you never know whether they’ll deliver or not. In the past 16 months, I’ve used 4 different website hosts. I don’t have any qualms about switching hosts if their service is lacking. The price range is roughly the same, about $5-10/month, except for MediaTemple which was $20/mo.
Blogging systems like WordPress use a database to keep track of all the information. Every time someone goes to a page, the database is checked and the page is created on the spot. This requires the databases to be on fast servers - something that many budget website hosts don’t deliver. I’m glad to say that I found one host that costs less than $10/mo that does deliver (this site is hosted there). Read more »
I noticed an article on the New York Times today that Network Solutions (aka www.netsol.com) has a policy of registering domain names that people search for. This was news to me, as I’ve always used them. Much to my chagrin, it is true - the domain name I searched for the other day - which I’ll withhold due to a reason outlined below - is now reserved by Network Solutions. What sneaky bastards. They’re apparently doing this to prevent scamming, but how does make this different from the scammers?
Of course, I had to call them and find out for myself. It turns out that the domain name is only ‘reserved,’ and can be purchased at the NetSol site for a whopping $35. I’ve always paid between $6-10 for a domain. I suppose it helps their business, since there are probably others like me who have used them to search and bought elsewhere. I won’t be doing that again.
The one positive is that they will release the domain to be registered by others after 4 days. So I can, apparently, register it on the 13th. It’s not as horrible as it initially sounded, but I wonder where the policy will go from here.
This past week we got stumbled. StumbleUpon.com is a website sharing social network, and someone liked my 5 reasons to move to Costa Rica. There was a DRAMATIC effect on our traffic - we went from some 20-ish visits per day to over 8,000 in 2 days. The majority of the visits were less than 1 minute, but a few people took the time to read and some did comment. Our feed subscriptions also increased by more than double, but I was immediately skeptical as to how many new people would actually continue subscribing.
Our traffic seems to be back to normal, though it’s hard to tell now since it’s the weekend, and the feed subscribers have dropped to just 40% more than before instead of 130%. I do think that some of the new subscribers will keep reading, and I feel good about the comment from the person who had never considered Costa Rica before. I suppose the big winner out of this experience was our host, as I didn’t notice any performance issues at all that day inspite of the insane traffic.
