Alex Muller

Internal Tools and Infrastructure

2013-04-30T18:30:00+01:00

At everywhere I’ve worked so far I’ve been disappointed by the tools available to employees to help them do their jobs better; put simply, I think every company I’ve been a part of could have benefitted immensely from a simple MediaWiki install.

Obviously I’m aware that the lack of such a setup stems from a people problem rather than a technical one, but it needn’t be a people problem. If there’s an argument that can be made against the following setup, I would love to hear it:

Install a wiki with text-based markup and an obvious, attributable change log. Everyone who gets an email address with your company gets an account.
The front page can only be edited by people who manage internal company communications. It should link to other important parts of the wiki.
Official policies and company documents can only be edited by a very limited number of people.
Everything else is a free-for-all, open to edit.

To pick on MediaWiki specifically: it is so good at handling all this kind of stuff, with a visible history with each change attributed to users. I’ve never come across an employee both malicious and stupid enough to bother messing with this theoretical open wiki and doubt I ever will. And if such a person did exist, they should be handled exactly as though they’d scribbled on the walls.

This is so appealing to me because I’m the kind of person who loves to read things. I really enjoy poking through obscure documentation, and if I have the ability to fix a typo easily, I’ll do it. On Wikipedia you might describe that kind of person as a WikiGnome. People should be encouraged to edit and to make a mess, because for every well meaning employee who adds something useful with bad syntax, there’s somebody like me who will make it neat. Win-win.

This isn’t a technical problem. The software exists, and it’s really good. And it shouldn’t be a people problem either.

At this point, I’m probably just rehashing things that people smarter than me have said before. If I was creating a company I intended to grow from scratch, here’s how I’d start:

A MediaWiki install as detailed above.
Internal services for employees have sane domain names with one internal TLD: http://calendar.muller/, http://wiki.muller/, http://mail.muller/, etc
Have an external domain that points to the same place, but only for services you want available externally: http://wiki.muller-network.com/.
No, your department doesn’t get to buy a domain name, hire a designer/developer and host a WordPress site just to show the rest of the company how great you are. Use the wiki.
Have well publicised places for employees to help you run your company better (Running a news site? Can Finance employees easily report typos? Why not?!).

A more concrete example

When I’ve got a few minutes in between work here I might pop on to The Times site, see what’s going on and find an article that takes my fancy to skim.

I did that the other day and found a pretty bad typo in an article, a remnant of an editor suggesting a text change that somehow made it through the CMS (part of the article text read “<NO1>10<NO>ten-month [sic]”). What were my options at that point?

Email it to… someone. The editor? The digital editor? The article author? Seems like a little bit of overkill to compose an email for a typo and send it to people I don’t know.
Leave a comment on the article, or do something else that any “normal” user could.

Why is there no third option? Why is there no issue tracker for employees to report problems, especially public-facing problems that make the company look less impressive at its core job?

I’m not picking on The Times or The Sun here, just using them as an example I’m familiar with: I’ve never seen this done well anywhere, but would love to hear about examples.

And if there are any good resources about internal tools and infrastructure (perhaps even long-form articles or books?), I’d love to hear about them.

On The Lab's blog: Designing for Receipt Printers

2012-12-03T19:20:00+00:00

I wrote a bit for the office blog about our work writing HTML and CSS that ends up printed on a bit of paper a couple of inches wide:

For web developers, there’s no real technical challenge in the front-end side of creating a publication; it’s all HTML and CSS with nothing to think about other than how WebKit will render your page in black and white. But this lack of difficulty is more than made up for with the tough constraints imposed by the media and the size it’ll be printed at. The printable area is less than 400 pixels wide and just 800 tall to avoid the unpleasant surprise of waking up to a publication five metres long trailing across the floor. Berg’s guidelines recommend that text should be sized no smaller than 20px (and they’re dead on), but with letters so large and paper so small there isn’t room to say much.

Designing for Receipt Printers (December 2012, News International R&D)

I love the way that our blog looks and works. It’s an Octopress-based static site. Bel created designs that look awesome, and David and I set the thing up.

Pirate Party UK

2012-11-01T14:50:00+00:00

(I originally wrote this article in about May of this year, when the news stories mentioned were current.)

2012 is the year I joined my first political party. After a bit of back-and-forth with my elected Member of Parliament (Conservative Mary Macleod) in which we discussed the CCDP, the High Court ruling against The Pirate Bay and Claire Perry’s dangerous crusade to censor the web, I wrote this to her:

The Internet is being legislated by people who do not understand it. I have not seen a single elected figure take any of the issues of digital civil liberties seriously, and as a result I am incredibly disheartened with the state of UK politics. As a twenty-one year old I find that quite sad and I hope you do too.

I remember being on holiday in April two years ago, in a game camp in the middle of South Africa, using a phone and a local SIM card to read about the Digital Economy Bill vote on Twitter. I can still remember feeling entirely powerless, and the same’s happening now with the three topics I mentioned to my MP — different Government elected, same mistakes being made.

I wrote her that message two days before the local elections on the 4th of May and was hoping for a little more of a reply than I actually ended up receiving; her assistant simply noted that my concerns would be forwarded to Ed Vaizey, who holds the title of “Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries”. While waiting for London Elects to announce the results of the election for Mayor of London I (re)stumbled across the Pirate Party’s site (led there, I think, by their Pirate Bay mirror). For whatever reason I had never before realised that their thinking was so aligned with mine.

I wish they weren’t called the Pirate Party. It’s not going to do them a single damn favour as awareness of them becomes more widespread. But having just one more MP who can talk sense about all things digital in the House of Commons (alongside Tom Watson) would be hugely beneficial for the UK.

Politics has made me feel nothing but frustration and disappointment for the last couple of years. I’ve finally realised that (much like every aspect of life) it’ll be far more productive to stop thinking negatively and put that energy into contributing to a political party that has sensible policies relating to issues I feel are the most important. Call me naïve, but I hope that the next general election will see the vote spread far more evenly across large and small parties, and the Pirate Party should be a piece of that.

That paragraph contains a phrase it feels like it’s taken me too long to realise. Sensible policies about issues I think are important. Bad legislation will continue to magically appear unless people who understand the issues involved make sure they’re vocal about the politicians who are doing it right.

I’ve mentioned to a few friends recently that I’m constantly surprised by how few young people are interested in the technical side of creating things for the web; a tiny minority of the population want to learn what HTML is, let alone anything more involved than that. Given how widespread the web is today and that it’s only going to grow, I’d expect far more enthusiasm for web development. That same idea applies equally to digital legislation, but perhaps attitudes will change as those who have grown up with access to a computer start being elected.

If you’re interested in The Pirate Party, have a flick through their 2012 manifesto which has recently been approved by members.

Twitter, Tweet Nest and the Data Protection Act

2012-08-17T10:50:00+01:00

I’ve had a copy of Tweet Nest running since the end of 2010, pulling in a copy of my latest tweets twice a day.

Unfortunately, as the nerds out there might be aware, Twitter allow access to just your most recent 3200 tweets online. The only way to get a copy of your older tweets is to send them a request under the Data Protection Act 1998. Folks elsewhere in the EU should have similar legislation to help them, but I’m not sure about other countries. To their credit, Twitter complied with the request fully (as far as I can tell) and without making it too painful for me (depending on how painful you consider having to send a fax).

Here’s the first twenty lines of the alexmuller-tweets.txt file they sent:

While it was good of them to supply so much information, there was really only one thing I was interested in: the list of status_ids of all my tweets. Twitter provide the tweet text as part of this request, but strip other interesting metadata such as location and source.

With that, I used a rubbish bit of Python (with tweepy) to pull every bit of JSON I could out of the Twitter API and save it to a file:

import tweepy
import json
import time
import datetime

# I found this somewhere online. Add a .json attribute to just get the raw JSON.
@classmethod
def parse(cls, api, raw):
  status = cls.first_parse(api, raw)
  setattr(status, 'json', json.dumps(raw))
  return status

tweepy.models.Status.first_parse = tweepy.models.Status.parse
tweepy.models.Status.parse = parse

username = "YOUR_USERNAME"
password = "YOUR_PASSWORD"
auth = tweepy.auth.BasicAuthHandler(username, password)
api = tweepy.API(auth)

myfile = open('list_of_ids_to_grab.txt', 'r') # this is a list of tweet IDs
jsoncontents = open('tweets.json', 'a') # blank file

i = 1

for line in myfile.readlines():
  print i
  print datetime.datetime.now()
  line = line.strip()
  print line
  status = tweepy.api.get_status(line)
  print status.json
  time.sleep(25) # 150 an hour
  donetweets = open('done_tweets.txt', 'a') # blank file
  donetweets.write(line + "\n")
  donetweets.close()
  jsoncontents.write(status.json + "\n")
  i += 1

WARNING: this code is so wonderfully breakable that it will probably set your machine on fire. You’ve been warned.

Basic auth calls are limited to 150 an hour, so I left this running overnight to complete. With the result, you can easily turn it into an array (wrap it in [] and add commas to each line, also known as the poor man’s way to code) and then use Bryan Veloso’s beautiful script to import it into Tweet Nest. It’s worth importing your older tweets first before setting up a repetitive job to pull in new ones, or else you’ll have to do some MySQL funkery that I can explain in more detail if you need (yell on Twitter).

This script highlights a problem that Twitter mentioned again last night: basic auth will not work for much longer. This is a huge issue for Tweet Nest too, as it doesn’t use OAuth. I’m going to (attempt to) add OAuth support to it in the near future.

While you’re here, let’s have a quick look at what else they returned from the DPA request. Apart from the normal stuff you shouldn’t be shocked to know Twitter have access to (direct messages, favourites, followers and following), these two things were surprising, though not massively so, to me:

A list of all the phone numbers and email addresses that were stored on my phone when I first ran the official Twitter iPhone app (1222 in total).
A list of every IP address that has accessed my account for the last four months (it’s fairly standard practice to store this).

For what it’s worth, I agree entirely with David Singleton, who tweeted:

In case it wasn’t clear, I’m pretty worried about the twitter changes too. I suspect many of them won’t be enforced, but still, dangerous.

No matter how much you trust Twitter, it would be prudent to store a copy of your own data.

Mid-2012 tech priorities

2012-08-05T08:05:00+01:00

A quick update on how I’m feeling about technology and computer stuff, and where my priorities are at the moment.

Security and ownership of data

Pretty much every password I use now is unique, and the ones that aren’t will be soon. I only know a couple of them from memory, and most of the important ones are over twenty characters. 1Password is still a dream come true. Password leak after leak has meant I don’t trust anyone online any more (and probably never should have).

I’ve changed the MX records (email provider) for this domain away from Google Apps and over to FastMail.FM. I’ll register new accounts with this domain rather than my @gmail.com address, and will move important services over gradually. I’m no longer comfortable with Google providing such an essential service for free. I pay O2 in excess of £30 monthly for a phone; why on earth was I holding out over £2.50 a month for email, which is arguably way more important?

Dropbox is no longer my go-to place to shove everything into. Instead, I’ll be even more anal about backup, soon setting up Crashplan to backup in an encrypted fashion to a drive at (my parents') home. This’ll be more useful when it’s actually an off-site backup.

For services that store data on my behalf, I’ve become a bit crazy about maintaining my own copy of that data. This includes keeping a copy of my Oyster card history using Mollusc, and sending Twitter a request under the Data Protection Act so that I can get a copy of my first three thousand tweets (they’ll be imported into Tweetnest soon).

Portability of data and striving to be lightweight

Much to Adam’s amusement, I fear, I’ve become a bit militant about the idea that web servers should serve HTML files whenever possible. To that end, this blog is now using Jekyll to generate HTML files that are transferred from my computer using rsync. I was rather shocked to see just how slow WordPress is:

Nothing’s changed with regards to what I wrote about links; I’ve tried to keep everything intact, and I think I’ve done pretty well. Old posts look old. I still like that a lot.

Reading

The iPad’s no good for long reading for me, even with the Instapaper or Kindle apps. Instead, I bought a (non-touch) Kindle from Amazon for my new commute and set up Instapaper articles to be delivered wirelessly each week. It’s incredible. The weight and the screen together make it a great reading experience on the Tube.

Money and graphs

I finally got serious about boring grown-up stuff like dealing with money. GnuCash is an excellent app, and I wish I’d been using it for years. I spend way too much on food. This is yet another example of how right Etsy are when they get shouty about measuring everything. Graphing expenses isn’t the most exciting thing in the world, but is so, so useful. For me personally, I find it so much easier to improve something if I can see it changing over time. A single GnuCash database that I can update both at my laptop and on an iPhone doesn’t seem possible today, but that’s the ideal end goal.

Later this year, I want to start graphing some of the data that’s generated by the house I live in. Andy Stanford-Clark gave a talk in York about some of his home monitoring kit and it’s got me a bit excited (his TEDx talk is very similar). There are hugely practical uses, like figuring out where in your house the majority of your electricity bill comes from so that you can do something about it.

And that’s where I am right now

A bit of a mishmash of stuff. This is just what’s important to me this month, a bit of a State of the Union brain fart.

Constrained optimisation to allocate modules at York

2012-03-26T21:05:20+01:00

A week ago today I handed in my final-year project in Computer Science (the infamous dissertation that the fine people of Twitter are completely bored of hearing me talk about). Like most in the department, mine consisted of about 20,000 words over seventy pages and a ten minute presentation describing the work I’d been doing for the last year or so. According to the staff involved, a University software project implemented by a student was something that had never been tried before, and as I had such a fun time doing it I thought I’d write a bit here. The aim was to create software that allocates students to modules.

The project had two fairly distinct halves: a web interface to let students express their preferences for optional modules, and a bit of software to take that input and do the allocation. The end result had to satisfy constraints from the departments (e.g. a class can’t have more than x students), while also trying to keep students as happy as possible – it’s a constrained optimisation problem. The more I think about it, this project could not have been any more perfect for me; half web stuff, half maths. Lovely.

The web development side of things was nothing too outrageously challenging. A lot of research and testing with staff and students to make sure it was as easy to use as possible, though the end product is just a jQuery sortable implementation. Those of you who have used the YUSU site to vote during elections will recognise that this software goes for the same mental model. Students in the Departments of History and Archaeology noticed that too, which was wonderful. Here’s a bit of video of one of the earlier functional prototypes (on an iPad, because iPads make everything cooler) – please excuse the music:

The constrained optimisation and linear programming stuff was where it started to get really interesting from a computer science point of view. The first I’d heard of CO was in about May last year, so having an expert supervisor was more than a little helpful. We used a solver (in this case Gurobi) to save a whole load of work on the implementation, and I’m shocked by how powerful it is. It’s got wonderful interfaces for several languages and is completely free for academic use! Linear programming and all that related gunk is such a huge field that if you try hard enough I bet you’ll be able to think of somewhere you could use it.

Once it was all set up, it’s just a case of creating a ton of (binary) variables, defining the objective function (what the solver should try to achieve), loading in the constraints and hitting the big red button. This system used the following:

Binary variables: one for every possible allocation (an allocation is a student, module pair), set to 1 if the student is allocated the module or 0 otherwise.
Objective function: a linear function that can be maximised or minimised by the solver. I chose to include every binary variable with a coefficient indicating the “goodness” of that allocation, which is based on the rank the student gave.
Constraints: each class had a maximum and minimum size, and each student had to take the required number of classes.

We’re talking about painfully simple code to interact with Gurobi, too. Here’s a bit of it in Python:

from gurobipy import *

model = Model("modalloc") # new Gurobi model
gurobivar = model.addVar(vtype=GRB.BINARY, name=student+"_"+module) # new binary var
model.update()
objfn = LinExpr() # objective function
objfn.addTerms(rank_coeff[ranks[(student, module)]], gurobimavs[student][module])
model.addConstr(num_students <= modules[module]['max'], "classmax") # constraint
model.optimize()

(There’s a slightly more fully-featured gist available, if you’re that way inclined…)

35 days until actual students start using my software. 50 days until the dissertation is due. 97 days until I finish at York. Gulp?
— Alex Muller (@alexmuller) January 23, 2012

I think what I love most about this software is that it’s a great example of a nice modular web project: none of the parts by themselves are horrendously complex, but they come together to make a system that actually solved a problem – code I wrote was used by 800 students in two departments, and the data it generated is now stored in the central student database. All my fingers are crossed that IT Services in York will be able to take the code on, spruce it up a little and offer it to many more departments next year. The report’s on GitHub, but private at the moment. I’ll make it public once it’s marked if I’m able to.

Final-year project: simultaneously the best, worst, scariest and fun (academic) thing I've ever done.
— Alex Muller (@alexmuller) February 2, 2012

The most proud I've ever been of anything. (If there's a typo on the front page I'm exiting via a 3rd floor window) twitpic.com/8y0t1n
— Alex Muller (@alexmuller) March 18, 2012

The web, growing up

2011-11-20T15:42:29+00:00

Jeremy Keith recently huffduffed a conversation about digital preservation. It revolves around the creation of archiving software that will hopefully help reduce the impact of link rot on the web.

(That conversation is interesting, and you should definitely have a listen. What follows is only tangentially related.)

This audio got me thinking about something that had always niggled at me in the past: the BBC not updating old article styles when they change the appearance of BBC News. Take, for example, what must be one of the most viewed BBC News articles of all time: “US rocked by terror attacks”, published on Tuesday 11 September 2001.

The BBC News site has gone through a thousand and one different looks over the last ten years (most of which spent a few weeks receiving hateful comments), but that article still looks exactly as it did on the day it was published. Contrast that with similar articles dated 2001 from The Guardian, Wired and The New York Times, and you can see they all match the current look of the site they’re a part of.

What the BBC are doing had always bothered me subconsciously, and now something’s changed. I’m not sure if it’s the audio that Jeremy posted which has swayed me, but suddenly I find myself really liking what the BBC are doing. I love that that article is still at exactly the same URL it was when it was published. I love that the source is filled with <table>s, <map>s and <font>s. And I love that the whole thing is 600 pixels wide.

It’s a piece of history. Even though the BBC have been criticised by many for taking historical content offline (including Jeremy, who hosts a sample of that content), I hadn’t realised how much I appreciate everything they put into BBC News.

I’m going to try my best to do the same with everything I publish:

URLs that never change.
Individual articles that look exactly as they did when they were published.

The first will be a challenge, since I’m already falling out of love with this domain name.

As to the second, I’ve made a start using the Custom Post Template plugin for WordPress. My post on York a year before I arrived here (reading that again is so odd) looks almost exactly as it did when it was first posted. (Yorkies: the Louis mentioned in that post is Louis Rose.)

And if I move away from WordPress in the future, it should be relatively easy to just keep shuffling the plain old HTML around so that everything keeps looking the same.

Most of all, I love that that York post now looks as old as it is. It was written by a sixteen-year-old in 2007, and it should look like it was designed by one too.

One Comment

zethraeus says:

14 January 2012 at 23:58

I think online identity is too important to lots of people and companies for them to be ok with keeping old content and layouts unadulterated. And what are you meant to do with entry portals that need to be updated with current information?

As a user though, it would be lovely to have a wikipedia-esque revision history for every page ever. Consider signing up for pinboard’s archival service. When you bookmark something, the page gets saved in its current state. It’s like the wayback machine, except you have control over when an archiving happens and it’s completely searchable.

Site verification

2011-09-22T13:23:38+01:00

Is it just the root of my server that looks a bit like this? With the upcoming launch of Twitter’s analytics service for website owners (which will presumably require some kind of verification), I was wondering:

Why isn’t there a standard, similar to robots.txt, for verifying that you own a domain? verification.txt?

google: Pt8rpfeQC4SCyzABFilZiJC5Tqw8f
googlehosted: Rb0S6k5si3nOj5rVfPmnzU0pYit
bing: eXB4oWQR1iVLtKp6Yk2hTq7N7JPjmoX5
yahoo: y_key_uyxZucu9dvrzsr3PWaYx9G5gLT
twitter: rqcSmFJIlugbPjXvI6vGuZi7YCiWXYR

I can’t think of a reason each service needs more than a few alphanumeric characters for this.

Contingency

2011-05-28T09:18:00+01:00

I’ve been thinking quite a lot recently about contingency plans, I think partially spurred on by (re-)finding Alex Payne’s rules for computing happiness. His rules have encouraged me to try and keep things as simple as possible, and to not to rely too much on anything that’s far outside my control.

So, I present a few scenarios that could easily happen over the next few years. While I hope none of them do, thinking about it in advance can’t hurt.

What if Apple stopped making the best OS?

This is becoming more of a worry with news dripping out about OS X Lion – Apple seem to be moving towards a simpler, iOS-like experience on the desktop. And while I hope they never abandon the nerds who love using OS X for development, I’ve got a horrible feeling we might wake up one day and find the command line gone.

I’d still keep using Apple hardware (it’s the best, see below), but I’d probably move to a Linux distribution. I’ve thought about this a bit recently, and I reckon the reason I’m such a fan of OS X is because it’s much more closely related to a LAMP server than Windows 7; making web development and testing that bit easier. Moving to from OS X to Linux would make more sense than moving from OS X to Windows.

Perhaps Ubuntu to start with, and then another distribution if I my needs changed or I felt a little more adventurous. Depending on how easily they installed on Apple hardware, of course, I’ve not looked in to that.

What if Apple stopped making the best hardware?

It’s really hard to imagine a world in which the quality of MacBook Pros drops so far that they’re no longer appealing. Given what I’ve seen recently at work I wouldn’t ever touch a Dell. I think a souped-up Lenovo ThinkPad might do the job quite nicely. An IBM ThinkPad T21 was my first laptop back the early 2000s, don’t cha know?

They seem like they make decent quality, not-beautiful-but-not-ugly laptops. A cursory glance at their online store suggests something like a ThinkPad X220 might work. £1100 for a 12.5 inch 1366x768, Core i3, 8GB RAM, 128GB SSD is comparable to a MacBook Pro on price though; the argument that “Apple is more expensive” seems to have been well and truly eroded.

A couple of months ago, Engadget called it “arguably one of the best laptops [they’ve] ever tested”. That’ll do.

What if Twitter shut up shop?

This would be really tough. Twitter is a few things to me:

It’s a place to meet new people with similar interests. I suppose I’d have to spend more time using Convore, Reddit, IRC? I’ve met quite a few people because of Twitter, and even got a few freelance web development jobs that turned out really well.
It’s a place to socialise with friends; Facebook would probably get that traffic.
It’s a place to find out the latest news that I’m interested in. At a few job interviews the interviewer has asked me how I keep up to date with the latest web goings-on. I haven’t been able to think of a better answer than Twitter and RSS.

I’d start blogging a lot more, and probably investigate installing my own service that would allow me to keep posting brief updates.

What if Spotify closed down?

Simply put, I’d have to find somewhere else to get my music. I’ve recently started paying £5/month for Spotify, and I’m sure there’s another service that would do suitably well as a replacement, though probably not with the same huge catalog. Last.fm (especially the radio) would probably get a lot more use from me.

What if Dropbox turned (more) evil?

I’d head over to Amazon and buy the smallest, cheapest USB flash drive they had going, and put it on my keys. We’ve got a few Sandisk Cruzer Blades at work; they’re currently under £14 for 16GB, and the price of flash memory drops every day. And Verbatim do 16GB in fingernail-size for £24, so that’d be another to go for.

I don’t think there’s a service currently available that offers the same convenience as Dropbox. And if the only file-syncing solutions are stupidly tough to use, I’d rather go back to carrying round my data with me.

What if the iPhone stopped being so damn attractive?

I’d probably go the route of webOS first – there’s something fundamental about the lack of attention to detail of Android that really bothers me.

I’d try the latest HP/Palm Pre in an O2 store, and see whether that works for me. And if not, probably whatever the latest HTC Desire S or Google Nexus S type thing is.

And on, and on, and on

What’s the one service that you completely rely on? And what would you do without it?

3 Comments

Chris Mear says:

31 May 2011 at 9:29

I think you forgot Gmail.

I’m not overly concerned about switching OSs per se, supposing Apple goes down the pan. (I mean, it’d be a shame; they make nice stuff. But let’s assume that they go down the pan because they stop making nice stuff.) I’ve switched OS before, and I can do it again.. What’s more concerning is the amount of money I’ve sunk into first- and third-party software and accessories for their platforms over the last ten years.

As a side note, I think it’s pretty safe that as long as the Mac is the development platform for iOS apps, development tools on the Mac won’t be going away anytime soon.
Alex Muller says:

4 June 2011 at 7:33

You’re right – totally forgot Gmail! I wonder whether that’s a scary indication of how much I take it for granted. I need to start moving over to using the address attached to this domain; it’s still Google Apps-based, but at least that means it’s far easier to switch away in the future.
Michael says:

7 July 2011 at 23:18

Interesting post considering what apple are doing to final cut…

As for phones, I recon you’d be better with a nexus than palm pre – purely due to app support…

Log files, laziness and stupidity

2011-05-21T10:47:16+01:00

Up until a few months ago, my site was hosted by the lovely people at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. Although I’ve had a Linode since the end of 2009 for development, sheer laziness had stopped me from moving this WordPress installation from NFS to my virtual server.

With hindsight, I did several stupid hosting-related things over the last year and a bit:

If I had just got around to it and moved the site from NearlyFreeSpeech to my Linode in January 2010, I would’ve saved myself $100 in payments to NFS.
Why so much? Well, if I had kept an eye on what was going on I would have noticed that I had (for some bizarre reason, which we’ll chalk up to ignorance) disabled log file rotation in the NFS admin interface. Which meant that every time somebody visited my site, the log file grew, and grew, and grew. And I paid for it. If I had enabled log file rotation, I still would have been out $40. But not a hundred.

Here’s a graph of my monthly payments to NearlyFreeSpeech:

This isn’t a knock at NFS: they provide a great service for very reasonable prices, as long as you don’t want to store too much stuff with them. I’d still happily recommend them for small(ish) sites.

Part of the reason I kept putting off the move was a worry that something would break and I wouldn’t be able to repair it. But the reason I rented a Linode in the first place was to learn more about how server maintenance and configuration works; I now know that “it might break” isn’t a good enough excuse.

The next time I procrastinate over something simple that could end up costing me $100, I’m going to slap myself hard and re-read this post.