Such is the common response to new users posting frequently-asked and answered questions on Internet forums, but in this case I’m referring to myself: the previous post is the second time I’ve used “death, taxes and stupid” in a post headline. I thought it sounded familiar, and when I used the “Search” feature, there it was.
It’s been over six years since that posting, so maybe I can be excused for not remembering.
I finally got on Twitter. Mostly it just reflects my Facebook status… but I do appreciate the fact that it does exactly one thing—no photos, videos, games, stupid time-wasting apps, etc. Let’s hope it stays that way.
Check out my “tweets” here: http://twitter.com/vtluu
Is it wrong to laugh at others’ incompetence and stupidity?
I don’t know, but regardless, FAIL Blog has just moved up to the top of my personal list of “fun” sites (displacing ICanHasCheezburger). It never fails—pun intended—to put a smile on my face, at the very least. (Mild NSFW warning; I’d call it “PG-13″ at worst.)
Check it out if you’ve got a minute or ten…
Okay, not really long, nor sordid, but I did notice however that it’s been two years since I started hosting with Dreamhost and, according to the archives, two years next month since I moved vtluu.net over to DreamHost. Funny how I couldn’t even remember who I was using to host vtluu.net prior to that; I had to search my archived E-mail to figure out it was Your-Site.
Was Your-Site that bad that I’ve apparently repressed all memories of it? Probably not; nevertheless, that Your-Site seems still the sleepy little company it was two years ago and that DreamHost has grown and developed even in the same period of time says a lot of about the two.
Without sounding overly gushy, I couldn’t be happier with DreamHost. I think it’s their ability to anticipate everything that I want out of a hosting service. When I wanted to set up websites using Joomla and Wordpress, they made that easy. When more recently I decided to move my E-mail hosting over to Google, they made that a breeze as well. Looking at their company info, I get the impression that their philosophy is to stay small, do one thing and do it well. I admire that kind of ambition—no fame-seeking, no Superbowl Ads… not what you’d expect from a company based in the heart of L.A.
Of course, business is business, and when it comes to the bottom line DreamHost has very competitively-priced service and a great referral bonus program, but here are a few other noteworthy items that make DreamHost stand out:
Anyway, if you’re looking for a new/replacement web/domain hosting service, check out DreamHost (and kick a referral bonus my way) at this link: http://www.dreamhost.com/r.cgi?225447.
I’ll wager that Matt Harding’s “Dancing” videos (also available in low-bandwidth and on Vimeo) have done as much to foster international goodwill as this year’s overhyped, overcommercialized Olympic Games.
I’ve known about Where The Hell Is Matt? for a while now, watched the video(s) many times, and yet it never fails to bring a tear or two to my eyes. I think the video speaks for itself far better than any hyperbole that I might try to add, so I’ll only say that if one geek doing his funny little dance is enough to bring a bit of the world a bit closer together, then maybe there’s still hope for us all.
I’ve made a fair bit of progress with the Vital Motorsports website. After a brief flirtation with MediaWiki, I decided it clearly wasn’t the right tool for the job. I then wasted a couple days designing a new website the “bad old” way—writing HTML and PHP code by hand—before my friend Bryan, a professional web designer, mentioned Joomla, a web-based “content management system” (CMS) tool for laying out, designing and publishing websites. Turned out it was exactly what I’d been looking for.
After getting Joomla up and running (which was super-easy using DreamHost’s “One-Click Install” tool) I quickly made a design by customizing (my HTML, CSS and PHP knowledge still have some use) an existing template, and then added some modules such as an event calendar and photo gallery. The process has been fairly pain-free.
Now the job is adding content. I’ve fleshed out parts of the site but there’s still plenty to be done. I’ve also started up my motorsports “blog” on the site, so hopefully I won’t be “polluting” vtluu.net with incessant car talk anymore (so what will I talk about?)…
Once things settle down with the new site, I’ll be applying what I learned to “re-launch” (that’s such a cliché) the vtluu.net website. I may end up using WordPress instead of Joomla for this website, since it’s more blog (how I hate that term) centric than my racing site.
What really boggles my mind is the complexity of Joomla and other web components. Fairly huge PHP scripts are needed to dynamically generate the contents of the Vital Motorsports web pages. I suspect that it takes about 10-20 times as much processing to serve up the front page of VitalMotorsports.com, compared to vtluu.net (which does use a little bit of PHP). I can definitely notice a bit of delay when loading the former. Mind you, the average web server now has 10-20 times as much processing bandwidth as the average server that was around back when I created vtluu.net; nevertheless I’m still amazed by the size and complexity of the building blocks used today. The web has come a long way since I built my first web page back in 1994.