Richard Lee Thomason

Finished evaluating a couple more hosts. In the performance department, poor Spry fell down. Although their account was a great package and their support very helpful, the connection speeds to their servers just aren't solid. Websites on my Spry VPS hosting account took forever to load and often timed out, and I know of way too many hosting providers that only cost $7.95 per month that are better than that. However, they only charged my for the partial month I was with them, so their billing was very fair. I was actually sad that their service wasn't better.

On the flip side to Spry is Host Gator, where I received the exact opposite. Server performance was awesome; very nice hardware and Internet connections. Then came billing and support. They actually turned off my dedicated server account for almost two full days without ANY warning at all because of a past due amount . . . on a different web hosting package! I had a basic shared hosting account with them previously that apparantly didn't get cancelled when I upgraded to a dedicated server. So they shut off my $174.00 / month dedicated server for a small past due amount on a completely different hosting package. Again, with NO warning. I called and called and called to get it turned back on, but it wasn't until late the next day that the "one guy" they had who could turn it back on showed up. Terrible.

They never could get my billing straight to this very day, and I have found their billing department to be completely inept and uncaring towards its customers, so I'll move on. Host Gator truly is one of the worst billing experiences I've had since I started hosting websites in 1995, and I've actually personally tested over 100 web hosting providers. They might have been one of my top picks for hosting, but in my opinion they just don't value their customers.

Posted by Rick at 02:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over the past six months, I had been checking out songs from Mnemic. At first, I just liked the one song. Then another. Eventually, I was digging pretty much every song they had. Mnemic, like Meshuggah, needs to be referred to as an "acquired taste", since their sound is quite unusual, even for a metal band. I went ahead and bought both Mechanical Spin Phenomena and The Audio Injected Soul, which are now listed in the Music section of my website. Looking forward to their next release, but it seems they split with their lead singer (just today, as a matter of fact). Currently, I am working on getting into Meshuggah, but that band has quite a few more albums out there. It'll take a while, but I like their songs so far.

Posted by Rick at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I've been redesigning some websites in an attempt to improve their search engine optimization, and I was quickly reminded how there are three major issues of website design that always seems to collide with each other. Sites built purely for SEO often use questionable CSS or just aren't very easy for the user to navigate. And, of course, sites that are built with great usability and nifty CSS design techniques aren't necessarily the best for optimization purposes.

Personally, I like building my sites with CSS, but some of the neat techniques for CSS design raise red flags with the search engines who think you are trying to hide text from them or otherwise deceive them. For example, the method of using CSS for replacing text with images is absolutely awesome for design purposes, but might actually cause Google, Yahoo and/or MSN to penalize your site's rankings. The use of display: none, display: hidden, and even text-indent: -9999px (or anything which places the text off the browser screen) are to be avoided if the intention is to design within Google's webmaster guidelines.

So, sadly, I've stopped using certain techniques because I don't even want to give search engines any reason to filter me, ban me, or penalize me. I'll err on the side of caution when it comes to designing my sites with CSS. Aside from balancing SEO and CSS design styles, I've still got to factor in usability for site visitors, making sure the navigation and information elements of the page are where they like them to be. Typically, with each website I design, one of those three factors gets a little abused. Trying to balance all three of those aspects certainly does take some of the fun out of website design, at least for me. *sigh*

Posted by Rick at 07:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Although I use Gossamer Links (aka Links SQL) for building link directories and database-driven websites, it does cost $450 per license and is not a cost-effective option for personal or non-commercial websites. So, I spent the day testing out some simple link directory scripts, which had to use PHP/MySQL, of course. The one that stood out above the rest was PHP Link Directory (www.phplinkdirectory.com). It is very easy to use, has a great user interface, and does everything I would want my link directory script to do. It's going to save me a lot of time and effort when building link directories on certain sites that I manage. PHP Link Directory only cost $25 per license, or $75 per license and the right to remove the link back to their website. Quite reasonable, even for a personal site.

Posted by Rick at 12:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the past, I used Soulseek for music downloads, but today I switched to LimeWire (www.limewire.org). That was a very easy decision to make. LimeWire is so much better than Soulseek, seriously. I had used LimeWire before and this new version (4.10.9) is simply fantastic. It's shareware so it's free, but has a Pro version that you can buy if you want support and other features. The user interface is sweet, downloads are very fast, and I can find songs so much easier than I could on Soulseek. Of course, I still go to Napster to buy any song I plan on keeping long term.

Posted by Rick at 05:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)