August, 2008

Over the last 6 months I have been working for a company on a selection of in-house developments. Yesterday in a meeting I found myself saying "Is Drupal too general?" and that got me thinking, "is it?".

All of my current web sites are hosted on a VPS from CheapVPS which came with CentOS and HostInABox installed. This is all good for a novice web site admin to setup a few sites, but I wanted to learn more.

So, I went on the search for a cheaper VPS to install Ubuntu 8 on and setup a web server from scratch. I ended up going with VPSempire who have the same parent company as CheapVPS (VAserv).

"Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends." This is the Wordle tag cloud for Millwood Online.

For the last week I have gone without internet at home. I just about survived on iPhone and work connections but over the weekend it was hard just relying on the iPhone. I is amazing how much of my weekend is spent online. I play Call of Duty 4 on my Xbox, online. I watch TV, online. I update my web sites, online. I find out information and browse, online. That is my normal weekend, and without an internet connection it is very hard.

I am now back in working and blogging from the work connection. The O2 web site states my migration from ADSL24 to O2 is in progress and should be completed today. I can't wait!

As a new user I cannot compare VMware Fusion with VMware Fusion 2 Beta, but so far I'm impressed. I am running Windows XP pro on a Mac Pro and Ubuntu on a Macbook Pro and both were very easy to setup and configure.

Windows XP

Today I started a project. Well I'm not sure if you can call it started, but started looking into it.

I'm planning on building myself a server, I was going to get an old unwanted PC, but 1, it's slow and 2, it HUGE! So instead I am going to build a mini-itx sever.

Mini-itx motherboards are 17x17cm in size and many come with built-in processers at very low cost. For example the Intel D201GLY2 motherboard comes with a Celeron 1.2Ghz processor for under £40. All that's then needed it a bit of ram, hard drive and power supply.

After playing around with Raincity's Basic theme and creating the crude looking theme for this site I thought it was time to make a custom theme for my "web development company" site.

So this time I used the layout-fixes.css file to create a fixed size page. The main page div is set to 800x600 so the content looks good on most screen sizes and the proportions also look good in the ratio 4:3. The content-inner div is set with an overflow of auto so that the 800x600 size is always maintained and scrollbars are added to the content if needed. The site background was generated using one of the many stripped background generators, but all the other graphics where hand made in photoshop.

After seeing Disqus being used by Rob Loach I thought I would install it.

So what is Disqus?
Well it is basically a centralised commenting system. All Disqus enabled sites allow commenting, the comments are then stored with Disqus. If an author of the comment is a Disqus user their comment is affiliated to their account. Disqus users can specify friends and comments can be followed much like twitter posts are followed.