Mindflight.org

New hosting provider and other changes

2007-01-15T15:35:06Z

A number of subtle site changes have occured over the past week. Figured I'd update on them.

First and foremost I've changed hosting providers. The new provider is HostMonster.com and has a very suitable package for me. They continue to use Cpanel as the management software which saved me some hastle in transfering my site(s) to the new server. But the big benefit is in having the ability to host multiple domains with one account and having 200GB of space to use. Admitedly I probably wont ever use that much space, but it gives me breathing room where I didn't have any before.

I've also finally rebranded the MediaStor project to HoardStuff. I've had the domain www.hoardstuff.com for a while, but couldn't use it with my old setup. I've finally made this live and moved things over. Whether or not I ever complete that project is up in the air, but at least it's finally on it's own site and setup the way I wanted to get it.

I've also picked up a slew of other domains all pointing to my main site, but they'll give me flexibility and ownership down the line should I want to use them. eliashunt.com, elihunt.com, raetha.com, feitae.com, praethos.com, naerden.com. Bulk rate domain purchasing is nice.

Anyway, at this point I believe all DNS changes are complete and email and site should be happily working in their new locations. There is the possibility that certain things aren't working correctly. If you find one please let me know.

Crying to the Darkness

2007-01-10T22:18:15Z

My heart cries to the Darkness
What is it that I've done?
To deserve the pain
That follows me always

From the Darkness comes
The faintest of replies
Nothing my son
Nothing at all

MySpace...

2006-05-15T16:14:05Z

is the Devil, or at least that is what I tell people publicly.

Roughly a year ago when I first heard about MySpace, I had my traditional response, "It's just another LiveJournal, god why are there so many of these damned things. It'll be just like instant messenger, I'll need an account on every friggin one cause my friends won't all use the same...". Rapidly degrading into one of my rants about society, the masses, our choices to follow fads and my general dislike of things in general. So I decided to not even bother looking at the web site and just pretending that I had never actually heard of MySpace, and that I would never need to, so it didn't matter.

Now, exactly what I feared has happened. A close friend of mine, and to be more specific, my fiancée’s sister, has gone to Alaska for the summer. She should have had cell phone coverage up there. But of course, Verizon slacked off again, said they covered it, but they don't. Verizon really is the Devil. So I get a voicemail from her boyfriend saying she is available on MySpace. Crap, damn, shit, expletive deleted.

I go to the site to see if I can find her account. First impression is not so wonderful, the ads get in the way, the CSS is mostly crappy, though that isn't MySpace's fault, that is due to the inexperience of writing good web code, and the fact that most people just plug and play bits of code into their profile. This creates horrendous web pages that barely render. Once over the CSS rant I finally find my friend’s boy friend that links to her. Having found them I suck it up and create an account.

Account creation was fairly simple without any real obnoxious steps. And I was quickly up and running and able to start doing things. At least it seemed like I was. As soon as I tried to add a friend I got a message saying that email was being worked on for some users. So I tried instant messaging my friend, that feature is down for weeks. Finally I found I was able to add their profile as a favorite and at least not loose track of them.

I next decided to try and add some useful information about myself. I managed to get my high school linked in from my home page, but then couldn't figure out how to add a college. Even went to the edit profile section at one point, but completely missed the "tabs" at the top of the page. Wasn't until the next day that I found out how to add other schools, companies, and change all the other information not on the first edit profile page.

The ads still piss me off, and the fact that there isn't an option to display both a nick name and your full name is rather irritation. Most people want to go by a screen name or a nick name, as do I, but it would be handy to see their full name in their profile, assuming that they allow it. Currently it can take some guess work to see if someone is who you think they are if they don't have up good pictures of themselves, or like some people have no pictures or only art.

Three days later and I'm up to thirty connected friends, with ten in the waiting for acceptance queue. About half of these are people that I don't talk to regularly if at all in years. Through most links I've made, I've found more people that I haven't talked to in years. It honestly seems like everyone is on this thing.

Ending thoughts. MySpace has a lot of issues and things that bug me, the worst is the repeated down time I find around sending email or adding friends. The ads could be better placed and less obtrusive, and there could be better control over CSS and code snippets forcing the user pages to render cleaner without as many problems. I do however strongly like the friend linking and the fact that all profiles are at some level open, so you can easily find friends through friends. Their contact importing should be expanded to include clients like Eudora, Outlook, LinkedIn and Plaxo. The internal email is one of the strongest features allowing people to communicate without giving away real email addresses.

Overall Rating: B-

Merge/un-merge, feels like a .COM

2006-05-03T03:49:23Z

So after just over a year and a half of having my blog separated from the main site and having a mini-blog on the main site, I've abandoned that setup. It caused me no end of hassles in not getting my formatting and CSS changes done, and trying to maintain two sets of files, some duplicates, etc., etc. So I've merged my blog into the new framework of the main site. All entries new and old should be in here, with the site specific entries intermingled like they used to be. Everything is using the new-ish look and feel, with some minor tweaks this evening. Old links should work, but I don't plan to keep them around forever, so please update any links and RSS feeds to use http://www.mindflight.org/ and not use the blog subdomain.

On that note I'm going to bed, it's late, been a long day of coding at work, and a long night of tweaking code at home.

Mindflight is Googlified

2006-05-02T22:23:49Z

I've decided to enter the realm of people who use Google ads and search functions. Currently I've just put some little tidbits in the sidebar to see how things go. If this works well I may eventually replace the internal site search functions with one of the Google variety. I'm also still planning to merge the main site and blog again at some point. Having both use the same templates, and abandoning any hope that I will every do anything other than a rarely used blog with this domain.