- Mazie throws blanket on floor.
- Dad picks up.
- Go to step 1.
Attempted unwise flash of WTR-54GS to DD-WRT while traveling. Doesn’t look good. Have a brick right now. Will investigate more in morning. 🙁
At the REI flagship store in Seattle. When you pass away, if you have been good your whole life, you end up at this REI.
What happens when you give a near 3-year-old a digital camera and explain how to take pictures? You get a lot of pictures!
Summer of Love Day 6 Log
- 9:00 am: Woke up in Seattle and noticed that the F5 Networks office is right across the street from the hotel. “Hi F5!” 👋
- 3:25 pm: Weatherman said rain for Seattle today. Couldn’t be more wrong. Beautiful and sunny.
- 10:12 pm: Discovered The Blair St. Mugwumps today at a music event in Seattle. Totally whacky. Bought two albums.
See full Summer of Love Collection.
Sounds of Glacier
About three years ago Dante Vono sent around some links to photos he had taken in Italy. They were really great photos, but what hit me more was that he had taken a handful of them with an audio recording as well. I looked at those photos and listened to the audio and was amazed at how the sound just transported me to the place. Arguably, it was more powerful than just watching a video of it.
Inspired by his example, I attempted to do something similar using my Zoom H2 in Glacier National Park. Hit play to experience this picture fully. I like how you can hear the rapids in the background with the water dripping off the rock over the top.
Summer of Love Day 5 Log
- 10:08 am: On the way to Seattle.
- 10:13 am: Going through Kalispell, MT.
- 2:07 pm: Relaxing lunch in Coeur d’Alene, ID. Now in pacific time.
- 3:41 pm: Rain, rain, rain. In Washington state.
- 6:44 pm: Going through Ellensburg, WA.
- 6:54 pm: Just paid $4.06/gallon for gas.
- 7:20 pm: In Seattle, WA.
See full Summer of Love Collection.
Sites Now on Slicehost
If you are a regular visitor to my sites you have likely noticed that a
couple of months ago things got much faster. You may be thinking that I
finally went to my server and hit the turbo button, but not so.
I had been hosting all of my sites on Dreamhost. They had a ridiculous deal for a year of hosting and I took advantage of it. There was a lot I really like about Dreamhost. Their web interface is really nice, better than most. Their directory structure that they lay out for you is sensible and very workable. All in, the service is pretty good.
However, I was having horrible problems with performance. I would go for hours on end where my site would take 4 to 6, or even 10 seconds to respond. That’s just running standard WordPress and even with the wp-cache plugin enabled. The culprit always seemed to be one of two things – really slow MySQL response times or, even worse, slow file I/O times to get at your own home directory. Enough is enough and I decided to move hosting providers.
I did a lot of research and decided I wanted to move away from a shared hosting provider like Dreamhost. They all over-subscribe their service, it’s the only way they can give those unbelievably cheap prices. Instead I decided to look for a virtual private server provider. After looking around for a while I found something I had never seen before, a hosting company that had nothing but good feedback from everyone.
A couple of days later I signed up on Slicehost and purchased my first slice. I chose a Ubuntu 7.1 image and after a couple of hours following their extremely well written documentation I was up and running. As an added bonus, I even learned things doing this.
I’ve now been using Slicehost for over a couple of months and I can’t say enough good things about them. The service is stunning, and the move to a virtual private server has given me some great other benefits. For example, my slice is now backed up every day as a virtual server. If something bad happens, I can click a couple of buttons in the panel and have my server back the way it was in no time.
If you’re looking for a provider, and are willing to roll your sleeves up, Slicehost may be the way for you.
Site Performance as seen by Google
I mentioned earlier that I had moved my sites over to Slicehost. My reasoning for this was performance. Here is a graph that proves that performance out as seen by the Google robot. This graph shows the response times that Google was seeing when it spidered my site. The crazy noise on the left is Dreamhost. The nice, flat, consistently fast response on the right is Slicehost.
The world of SEO is filled with black magic, but I have had people that know there stuff highlight that site behavior does impact your ranking in Google. This intuitively makes sense. If your site is slow or eratic in response, Google is going to give a bad experience to the visitor they send to you. If you are fast and always available, it will be good. It’s easy to see how this could be used to influence search ranking, but it’s not provable.
Either way this is a good thing (tm) and it’s good confirmation to see the site performance improvement vetted from a third party like Google.
