Monthly Archives: April 2007

Web/Tech

Web hosting, bandwidth, slashdot – what?

April 13, 2007 – 8:19 am

For a while now I’ve been thinking about moving my blog to my own domain rather than use this Typepad one so I thought I’d start researching web hosting and so on. I’ve had some experience with this for the safarisuit.com domain but wanted to find out more.

In my research I realised that if a website is, or becomes, popular and therefore uses a large amount of bandwidth, the proper web host and web host package is essential to cover this. Safarisuit.com is hosted within Australia and which is apparently more expensive than a US based one. Correct me if I’m wrong. It’s unlikely the website will ever be really popular unless safari suits become popular amongst celebrities or something.

In researching this bandwidth thing I kept coming across this term ‘Slashdotting’. Not knowing what the heck this was, I did a Google search and found heaps of blog posts by people very happy to have the extra traffic from being Slashdotted. The downside seems to be that your web host might just take down your website, or charge a heap of money for the extra bandwidth to your site. This of course is a double edged sword and one to be wary of when choosing a hosting provider.

I found the slashdot.org website but apart from it looking like a news type website I couldn’t find out what it is about apart from the tagline; ‘News for nerds. Stuff that matters.’ One of the fundamental rules of Web usability, particularly for an organisation, is an About us page outlining what the website/organisation is. I eventually found the explanation I was looking for on Wikipedia and after doing a text search on the Slashdot homepage found the About link buried at the bottom. All the other navigation on the page got in the way of me finding it more easily.

I digress though. My goal had been to research web hosting providers and I’m no further than when I began. As you can see I got waylaid by the whole bandwidth thing which is the trouble with the web. It’s too easy to be distracted from your original goal and forget about what you started doing in the first place.

I wonder if this is a common phenomenon or whether it depends on an individual’s personality. I find myself easily distracted when doing housework. For instance, I’ll go to put something away in my bedroom because I want to clear up the kitchen. Once in my bedroom I’ll see something there that needs doing. I’ll eventually find my way back into the kitchen and see that I hadn’t finished in there but not remember what I’d originally planned to do. Therefore a small task turns into a much larger one because what started out as tidying up one room ends up being a whole house tidy up.

So I’m still no closer to finding a web host to host the domain whose name I can’t even decide on yet. In the meantime there’s heaps on the internet to keep me occupied.

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Parenting

Posing comes naturally

April 9, 2007 – 8:25 pm

Posing comes naturally

JJ’s hair was a bit long so I decided to tidy it up a bit. I’ve no proper idea what I’m doing with his hair, but the only thing he will let me do is cut through it to tidy up the knots a bit. If I didn’t do this the dreadlocks would get really thick and ugly. He wouldn’t let me try and separate knows with my fingers because of the pain, so the scissors have been the tool of choice.

I started cutting it in this manner this afternoon and his hair was just messy and he wasn’t happy with the slightest tug to his scalp, so I started chopping some of the length. We got shorter and shorter and the compromise for his request to cut it all off and my wish to keep some length was this (see photo).

It looks so cute and makes him look a bit younger and I think he’s really happy with it.

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Parenting

Etiquette when kids answer the phone

April 7, 2007 – 9:06 am

I have to constantly work with JJ to learn how to behave appropriately both socially and when we’re at home by ourselves. It’s unrelenting because he just doesn’t seem to get it as easily as some other kids. There are glimmers of sunshine though amongst the clouds.

I’ve started to let him answer the phone occasionally. He does ask if he can answer it which is good. I usually really don’t like it when I ring up someone and their kid answers because it’s hard to have a conversation with a kid. Sometimes they hang up on you, most times you just don’t understand what they are saying and you haven’t rung up to speak to them, you’ve rung to speak to their mum or dad. I now understand why parents let their kids answer the phone, it keeps them off your back for a minute and they’re a good screening device provided they can tell you who it is.

However, when JJ started answering the phone he would just say ‘Who is it?’. This is probably because that’s the first question I ask him if he does answer the phone so he’s just short-circuiting any social niceties by asking it straight out.

I’ve said to him, it’s polite to say hallo when you answer the phone, before you ask who is it. The other morning he answered the phone. He picked it up, he hesitated, then said, ‘Good morning, who is it?’.

Some of it’s sinking in I thought to myself. I made a point of telling him that he was very polite when he answered the phone because I’ve got to do a lot more positive reinforcement to make it sink in to him to keep continuing the good stuff.

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Journal

As the seasons change

April 3, 2007 – 6:39 pm

frangipaniThis is the last of the frangipani flowers on my tree for the season. It’s now autumn, the days are getting shorter and the nights are getting colder.

Pretty soon all the flowers will drop off and then before too long the leaves will drop off and the tree will be bare until it gets warmer.

When I moved into my house eight years ago, this frangipani tree was in a pot, and not very big. I planted it in the ground outside my kitchen window so that when I am standing  by the sink I can see the tree, and I can smell the flowers. It will eventually block off some summer sun.

They are slow growing trees but my patience is paying off and I love the smell of the flowers so.

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Uncategorized

To clean up your old blog posts, or not?

April 2, 2007 – 4:41 pm

Over at Problogger, Lorelle VanFossen wrote an excellent article called ‘Blogging is Writing‘. She brought up an interesting point (no. 22):

‘Clean Up Old Posts: As your blog writing improves, go
back over your old posts and clean them up. The fresh perspective will
help you edit and improve the content. You might find new life in your
old posts and direct more traffic their way.’

Everything else in her post I agreed with, but this I didn’t. To me, writing a blog post is a snapshot in history, and you are changing history if you go back to edit it. Having said that I’ve gone into a blog post and added an update and clearly stated it as such. I probably should put the date I’ve updated but I haven’t done this. Until I read Lorelle’s article I thought this was an unwritten blog rule as I’ve seen it on numerous blogs. In addition to the ‘update’ I’ve seen strikethroughs of a word or phrase with the updated word or phrase next to it.

Just a couple of months ago I wrote about my blog being the eternal first draft because this is something I think about every now and again. There’s a few posts of mine that people keep visiting via search and I would like to rewrite these, but I think I would do it in a way that’s obvious it’s a rewrite.

This would also provide the opportunity of adding thoughts from comments into the mix (with proper attribution and links of course). In the updated/renewed post I would say that it was a rewrite of an older post, with a link back to it, and the reasons for rewriting. Doing this would also be a good way of seeing how your writing has changed over time.

What do you think? Should you edit your old posts to improve them, would you rewrite them as a new post if it was worthwhile, or would you just not bother? Let me know, and if there’s enough responses I’ll get a new blog post out of it with a summary.

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