Quick rundown and review of phpfog (www.phpfog.com) Platform as a Service (PaaS) for PHP projects that offers great scalability, easy management, and robust performance. Geared very much towards custom app developers, I find it also to be a great platform for people looking for a very robust platform for out of the box software like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, as well as frameworks like ZenD and PHPCake.

Probably not. I’ve been pretty absent for a good long while. And while I make no excuses for myself, I will say that things got VERY complicated for a good while. Very.

But that’s all behind us now! We’ve got a computer that works (YAY!), essentially free web hosting (MORE YAY!), and a couple subscribers on my YouTube channel. So with all that said, here’s the basic gameplan.

I wanna be making AT LEAST 1 tech video a week. A lot of the views I have are for my tech videos, so I’m going to stick to that for sure. Tech is what I do for a vocation though, so more then 1 video a week kinda makes me queasy… In addition to that, I’m hoping to have 1-5 gaming videos a week. Right now it’ll be MineCraft, BattleField, and other Indie Games. I really enjoy gaming, and making play through’s just seems pretty natural to me.

As far as the blog (You Are Here) it will most be a secondary place to put my video’s for now, however, I do plan on adding detailed instructions to any of my tech videos, as well as other documentation here. If time permits you might even get a genuine article out of me (maybe).

So, if you’re reading this, thanks for being here! Please enjoy your stay, and make sure and check out my YouTube Channel!

-zevind

Wanted to show off one of the outposts on the DailyNerd minecraft server. This is one of the newest outposts, and one if my personal favorites. We really tried to keep the landscape mostly intact with a lot of these structures, and almost just embed them into hillsides/etc. Will probably upload a few other highlights of the server, including the alpha 1.2 areas.

Quick review and how-to for cloudflare (www.cloudflare.com ). CloudFlare is a CDN (content delivery network) for your whole site. They do this via DNS records, as they become your NameServers. Overall the service is a god-send to IT people like me. The “business” keeps wanting more and more traffic (can’t blame them for that) but doesn’t want to spend the money to upgrade the webserver. Over the course of the last year I have tried to eek out every bit of performance out of that webserver via caching, opcode cachers, sql indexes, FastCGI + PHP FPM, etc. I (proudly) got the massive site up to about 900+ requests a second before it would choke, but unfortunately even this wasn’t enough. In comes cloudflare, which I had seen from Disrupt, and decided to give them a quick test run. Long story short, cloudflare now handles 60%-70% of the requests that would normally hit my webserver, saving me from having to worry about scaling for a long while. It’s an amazingly easy service to setup and try, and even the most basic blog could benefit from the security enhancements that come with it (XSS prevention, POST exploit detection, etc.). At any rate, take it or leave it, and lemme know what you think in the comments.

Quick bit of game play of Crayon Physics Deluxe, currently available in the humble indie bundle – www.humblebundle.com Going to try and showcase all the humble bundle games before the week is out, it helps indie devs, benefits charity, and you get some awesome games at the same time.

Siteria makes website building brilliantly easy. Their front-end edit functionality means that there’s no code to edit, no confusing form to fill out. You just click on the content you want to edit, and change it as easy as changing a word document. Their service comes with over 100 different website designs for you to start from, customize, and make your own. Customization can be done in a matter of minutes or hours. Not days. I apologize if I sound a little over eager, but Siteria really just blows me away. I have done freelance web design for almost a decade, and I have always thought that there must be a better way to go about designing a site then writing HTML and PHP from scratch. Even using a content management system like WordPress or Drupal leaves something to be desired. Siteria really makes quality web design within reach of anyone. I really think Siteria can meet the needs of 90% of companies, bloggers, etc. If you have any questions about a particular feature or use case though, try the 14 day trial, or leave your question in the comments and I will do a follow-up review to answer your questions. Cheers! siteria.com

WhichLance.com aims to bring a single place to fairly compare and review all of the hundreds of outsourcing and freelancing marketplaces on the web. With a standard breakdown of features and pricing, it’s a great place to pick a site to find extra work at, or find skilled professionals for your next project. With all of the outsourcing sites that are out there today, I’m really excited to find a site like WhichLance.com that can make picking the best one for my needs, really easy. So the next time you’re in need of an outsourcing or freelancing site, save yourself some headache and quickly find the right site for you on WhichLance.com Cheers www.whichlance.com

VendingBox is a neat service that lets you setup a storefront INSIDE facebook in a matter of minutes. There’s no setup costs, no monthly fees, and no transaction fees if you sell under $100 a month. I think this is just wild, being able to have a storefront up a running in facebook so fast, and for no money up front. Also, if you already have an eCommerce site running OScommerce, ZenCart, or Magento, VendingBox will integrate with them so you can maintain inventory across all your venues. Anyways, let me know if any of you get a vendingbox setup and post the link in the comments. Cheers! www.vendingbox.net

Quick little shoutout to my favorite used video game/CD/DVD/Book website Glyde. In a nutshell, Glyde allows you to buy, or sell, any used media through their site in a very simple, intuitive way. Buying is as simple as using the search bar to find the item you’re looking for and purchasing with 1 click. Selling is made simple too, in that all you have to do is find the item you wanna sell, choose the condition that best describes your copy, pick a price, and you’re done. When your item sells, Glyde sends you a pre-addressed, pre-paid padded envelope! All you have to do is sick your item inside, and hand it right back to the mailman. Glyde is a great way to basically rent games or DVDs, or to just unload that box of old video games in the garage that you’re too lazy to list on ebay. www.glyde.com

Quick Shoutout to fiverr.com, a great web service to get stuff done for $5. So the next time you wish you had a custom logo for your website, a postcard from England, or someone to review your english lit paper, check out fiverr.com www.fiverr.com www.dailynerd.net