fuzzyraygun

In one way or another all hosting providers suck. Either they are super cool and give you lots of stuff but their servers are down ALL THE TIME or they are super on top of it but they don’t have good server plans and they are expensive.

EVERY hosting provider has something that will drive you nuts.

• Hostway – Expensive crappy plans with no multiple domain hosting. Good control panel though
• Dreamhost- Awesome control panel and one-click installs along with free multiple domain hosting. Nice people but the servers are down constantly.
• Aplus – cheap plans and the servers stay up, but a crappy control panel, no mutiple domains, no one-click installs and Zero customer support.
• Rackspace – awesome place, but I don’t have a trillion dollars to spend on my crappy websites.

The list is endless. I have yet to find a hosting provider that I was happy with for more than 6 months. In over 10 years. Wow that is really crappy.

While I am writing this post about hosting providers sucking. My hosting provider has gone down AGAIN.

07/01/08 – Updated on this. The reason my hosting was going down was very surprising. It seems that my old band tinyblackdots just happens to be “big in japan”. Japanese and chinese search engines had scraped my site and were offering free downloads directly to the music on my site. These thousands of downloads were crippling my server and causing all my other sites be down. Had to move my MP3s to the myspace.com site for my old band. I guess there is a reason for everything.

(Side note… This post just happens to be #666)

I have been working on a new record as a wedding gift for Alanna and it is done. Well almost. I have finished the mixes for it and the first pass of mastering is done, so now I just have to finish the CD design and it is off to DiscMakers to get printed. Sweet. It feels kinda weird to not have those songs hanging around anymore.

Finishing a book is just like you took a child out in the back yard and shot it.
– Truman Capote

I was talking to Alanna this morning about how PhotoShop should have a grid palette or some other sort better grid device than the simple “preferences/grid” built in. As I was looking around, when I got to work, I found a nice grid making script made by Andrew Ingram. It was also written about in John Nack’s Adobe blog.

This small script file goes in your “photoshop/presents/scripts” folder, on your hard drive, and you can use it to auto create a new document that has all your “Guides” already setup for you. The super cool thing is that if you re-size your document, which is something that happens a lot, it will move the “Guides” also.

Todd at work thinks that Photoshop just doesn’t have the same grid making devices as other layout programs like InDesign, because PhotoShop was not originally made to do layout. It has only ‘evolved’ into the standard for web layout and that web designers have been slower to adopt grids for design than print. I think he is right on target here. I still think Adobe should make this a better implemented feature inside of PhotoShop though. Something like how it is implemented in InDesign maybe. A palette where you can apply, save, update your grids. They would not have the same effect as InDesign where changing the grid automatically changes all the content inside of it, but it would help designers with layout decisions in the web space.

Grids make good design.

While Alanna was gone last week, I got some more mixing done for the new record. Its really shaping up. Should have most of it done by the end of the week. I just need to get the artwork done and get it mastered before I send it off to be duped.

Haven’t really had that much time for much else these days. I’m kinda neglecting certain things but thats OK for right now. Alanna and I need to get in gear with wedding stuff. Pretty soon it will be the big day… Time moves much faster than you think it does. Especially if you have a list of stuff to do.

Most people go their whole lives trying not to “get in over their heads”. They guard their precious time and take baby steps, waffle and stutter and in the end don’t do the things that they think about doing. I have taken the opposite approach. I have been trying for a while now to get in over my head. And actually I’m quite pleased with the outcome.

I realized a while back that most of my inhibitions about so called “Getting in over my head” was disappointment. My disappointment, some else’s disappointment in me etc.. etc.. And then I remembered one of my favorite quotes

“You wouldn’t care what people thought of you, if you realized how little they did.”

I’m not sure who said it, but it has stuck with me for years. What it means is that people are not thinking about you as much as you think. It doesn’t mean that they don’t love you or respect you or that they are not your friend or your brother or sister, it just means that they have their own problems and waiting with bated breath to hear about, criticize and vocalize about every little thing you do is not one of them.

Around the time that I met Alanna (2000), I started to realize that the thing keeping me from doing all the stuff that I wanted to do (vacation, make music, get tattoos, learn programming, make art) was really me. It wasn’t time.. It wasn’t resources.. It was my own inability to realize that no one, but me, really cared whether I did it or not. Since then I have made records, I have traveled, I have learned new stuff, played music. I have tried to keep my plate so full of stuff that I can’t possible get all of it done. And the strange thing is… I have been able to get stuff done. lots of stuff.

And when I screw up.. and can’t get stuff done. I say oops sorry, and then try to get it done next time. I highly recommend saying “Yes”, to things. Trying to fill up your plate with as much stuff as you possible can, until it falls off the side and you have to scoop it back on again. Kinda like your plate at Thanksgiving.

To go along with my series on over planning, I thought I would talk a little about “content management systems” or CMS systems. Most people who want these do not need them. Most people who need these don’t really need these either. CMS systems work great if you have 1000’s of products and hundreds of pages on your site, and even then you can usually get by with a good template system. But if all you have is a brochure site (industry term for pretty picture site with not much content, database or commerce.) then you DO NOT need a CMS. What you really need and all that most companies and websites really need, is a couple of good HTML people.

Pick a flavor
CMS systems come in all flavors. They work on Linux, Unix, MAC, Windows boxes. All sorts of languages and versions, PHP, Perl, ASP, JSP, Struts, Ruby, JHTML, Joomla, Contribute, Drupal, Hot Banana, or if you really have some money to throw down a deep dark pit Interwoven Teamsite. I am even writing this to you on a CMS system. Wordpress is great and for all purposes its a CMS. Most blog software is. People just don’t think of it that way. You can easily make a company site in Wordpress, lots of people do.

Templates on Steroids
Most CMS systems are basically templates on steroids. What they add is a administrative back-end. They lock down most of the presentation code so that you can get lots of people into an administrative back-end UI where they can edit content and not have to worry about HTML or the code behind the website. Most people say “Why do I need to pay these engineers/designers to change text on my website? I can do that myself!” or “So and so in the so and so department can make all the changes.” And to a certain extent they are right. If all they wanted to do was make some text updates or change a press release I’m sure they could do that, there are even some where you can move content modules around pretty easily, but the trick really comes in when you want to do more than that. And everybody…. I mean everybody, usually wants to do more than that.

Why won’t it do that?
CMS template are usually setup by engineers or outside vendors for companies that think that they will be editing their website. They often things like “Once we get the CMS setup, we won’t need as much help in doing the updates.”. What often happens is that the CMS is built and put in place and everything is just fine until people start wanting changes that is outside of the basic text edit. If there is not a CMS person on staff, then someone will have to learn all the ins and outs of the new system. They start wanting to move stuff around, they want to add pages and NAV and promos and banners and god forbid they want a form. Since most are not HTML people to begin with they usually have a rough time learning. Here is where all hell breaks loose and they throw up their hands and say “Why can’t I do that?”. They can’t do that because the template is doing exactly what it is there for. It is there to lock down the presentation layer of the website, so that people cannot screw it up. So now they have a content management system that they have to get help with to make all the changes that they thought they were buying the CMS to avoid. Only now it costs more because they have a strange CMS template system that is complex and a pain to update.

It’s all OK
Don’t get me wrong, CMS systems are good things, but they are definitely not going to save you time or money. They are there to add a layer of abstraction to the website so that, if you wanted, you can get lots of people involved with updating it. But with all layers they add complexity that most companies don’t realize until they already have it working on their site. I can’t even tell you how many companies I have run into that have spent over 6 figures moving a big site or building a big site in a CMS system only to realize that they can’t make all the changes that they wanted and are right back at square one.

The keys to doing a CMS right? Here’s a few.

• Plan on who will be updating the site. How.. and How often.
• Understand what can and can’t be changed through the regular CMS interface.
• Make regular managed updates. Set a schedule for when things get updated and how. Stick to it.
• Have a good preview system setup so that you can make changes and see them before commiting them
• Have manual and training sessions for the people that will be doing the bulk of the updates. Make sure that if people leave they don’t take their knowledge with them.