There has already been a long debate about hosting your own DNS servers and mail servers but I’ve found once again relying on Godaddy total DNS management and using GoDaddy e-mail forwarding has made my three migrations over the last year a breeze. So I suggest to everyone:
Suggestion One:
Don’t mix your host and your registrar. You might not see your domain again.
For anyone looking to create their own site I urge you, never register your domain with your host. There are too many hosts out there that are priced well and say they have great service but when you find yourself needing to move the domain that they registered for you will tie you down.
This is probably the only suggestion I can give to the majority since the next two are more for the VPS or dedicated server owners.
(more…)
One of the first things I did on my Media Tempe (dv) was install webmin because I’m a huge fan of easy it let’s you manage your web/server, e.g. web interface to quickly change config files or restart particular services without having to login through SSH.
A more official description:
Webmin is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. Webmin removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files like /etc/passwd, and lets you manage a system from the console or remotely.
Add the following section to /etc/yum.repos.d/CentOS-Base.repo
[dag]
name=Dag RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el$releasever/en/$basearch/dag
gpgcheck=1
enabled=1
Install GPG key/signature by running
# rpm –import http://dag.wieers.com/rpm/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
Run
# yum install webmin
Your webmin should now be available at
http://your.ip.address:10000/
or
https://your.ip.address:10000/
and you can login using your root account.
I would highly recommend the stressfree theme for webmin, it makes it much easier to navigate. Also, Virtualmin is a must if you manage a lot of domains, it “supports the creation and management of Apache virtual hosts, BIND DNS domains, MySQL databases, and mailboxes and aliases with Sendmail or Postfix”.
I’d recommend reading this illogical post from Duncan at Techcrunch and then rally around Matt in the comments section.
After reading all of Duncan’s and Matt’s comments I had to throw my two-cents in,
Duncan: I don’t see your point. You mention that Matt can’t have it both ways but by writing this article and placing *your* issues into a “gray area” you’re rewarding your terms with two-ways to lean; neither for or against, making you’re actually opinion irrelevant. And isn’t this just an opinion piece? I don’t see any facts–that are correct–, it’s all lambasting for self-promotion, similar to your friends at Vallywag.
No matter how many times you’ll be told that your statements are false and irrational you’ll always be clinging to that “gray area” message.
In your response to the question you pose to Matt, “WTF did someone do to you BTW? Where did this hatred come from?”. What exactly made you criticize Matt–and by association the entire wordpress community of developers and supporters–? All without one ounce of research of how to properly run a business through OSS, the business model of automattic and how Matt runs it, the history of wordpress or even get to know how spam works? Instead of reporting you glued your self-important thoughts together and lambasted the very person AND the community that built the infrastructure for you to get paid from.
I find this post so disturbing as D’s trying to associate taking advantage users by placing paid text ads on released code is the same as Matt providing a service through Wordpress.com and Akismet. He really needs to step back and learn a few things, specifically:
The Blogroll: it’s there as an example for users, is easily managable and provides a credit to the hard 
working developer community. Since Matt works very hard at wordpress.org he deserves it like the others. Lastly how does he make money off of those links again?
Akismet: Is entirely a service. Yes the free Akismet users contribute to the whole but they also benefit is the entire community. Matt is not holding back the perfect solution to stop all spam for every wordpress user, he’s just providing an added value to the paid users of Akismet because it includes a service level that the free addition could not support.
Wordpress.com: Charging for an extra service level through Wordpress.com doesn’t leverage the community nor the code-base. It’s a service level agreement that you’re paying for, similar to Akismet.
Update: Another comment.
This has got to be the best review/article on the age old debate of Linux vs. Mac. The article is extensive but the conclusions on the topic mimic my sentiments exactly.
In the following pages, they lead a guided tour of the two OSes, paying particular attention to eight important areas: Installation & Migration; Hardware Support & Power Management; Networking, Web & Wireless; Productivity; Entertainment; Security; Working With Windows (because we couldn’t completely ignore Microsoft); and Stability, Backup & Disaster Recovery.
Which is the better OS? Only you can decide –but you’ll make a more informed decision after you’ve taken this tour, and you’ll discover you have some companions on your journey.
I will admit I have not completed the entire article, I have skimmed and read the beginning and end but it is something I want to go back and finish. I also don’t think anyone can conclude that either writer is biased because from what I’ve read the entire article plainly exposes the downsides of each platform in almost every major factor of any OS. It’s really apparent within the conclusions which they make the reader decide what’s best for them.
The conclusion of the review that mimics my take exactly (spoiler alert):
Conclusions: Linux
Linux gives you freedom on many levels: the freedom to tinker, the freedom to work without arbitrary constraints on your system setup, and the freedom to make decisions about nearly every aspect of your system.That freedom does come at a cost, though — the cost of a certain degree of effort. I haven’t yet dealt with a single Linux install that didn’t require me to edit some configuration file somewhere. That said, the amount of effort required to get the Linux system you want (or need) has gone down enormously with time.
If the freedom to use your PC in as unhindered a way as possible is important to you, that’s what Linux delivers — although keep in mind it comes with a learning curve, one that is still flattening out rather slowly.
– Serdar Yegulalp
Conclusions: Mac
If you believe that open source is a moral choice — and many people do — then buying Apple is making a deal with the devil. Apple is arguably the most proprietary hardware / software company in the industry, despite Mac OS X’s origins in BSD Unix, and the products’ compliance with many industry standards.You think Microsoft locks users in? At least with Microsoft you can buy a PC from a huge number of big and small vendors, or build your own from components. With the Mac, you buy your PC from Apple, you buy your operating system from Apple, and you’re also encouraged to buy your mouse, keyboard, display, audio device, and smartphone from Apple, all at an Apple Store where you can get Apple service.
But if you’re willing to live with lock-in, Apple is a great choice for computing. Installation isn’t a problem — Apple does it for you. Networking is easy. Productivity is a dream. The Mac offers a broad variety of entertainment options. It’s a secure platform. It interoperates well with Windows. It’s highly stable, and offers solid backup choices for the data losses that are inevitable on any computing platform.
Right now, Apple is smokin’, and its customers are happy. But if the Apple gets rotten and starts coming out with inferior products — as it did in the ’90s — its customers will have the choice of suffering, or making the painful switch to another platform.
Until then, I’m sticking with the Mac. It’s a great computer.
– Mitch Wagner
Well said…most of you know where I stand but no platform is perfect and it’s up to the user to decide what they value the most.
Received a Pownce invite from Techcrunch’s newly purchased inviteshare.com. I’d like to say that inviteshare is not just a great idea but the design and implementation is wonderful. I received my invite to Pownce in less than 5 minutes of requesting it; I just hope the demonoid invite get fulfilled through it’s small community.
On to my early impressions of Pownce:
It’s been compared to Twitter but it’s completely missing the mobility of Twitter and the accessibility of Twitter. Without an API it’s going to be very hard to get updates of what’s going on over there and actually updating your friends requires you to login to the site or use the AIR application they’ve released.
That AIR application is rather bulky. Not in application size or overhead, I’m actually sure it’s very light using the Adobe framework but the design of the app is too simple. You can’t change the style, transparency or size and I do not need anything else on my desktop. That’s what I love about Twitter because I already have IM open and getting updates through IMs and sending messages through IM fits perfectly into my mobility. Pownce is lacking in this area to the tune of null.
The feature set is everything that I’d ever want in a mini/social-blog. You can send files, separate links out, post files or events and it’s not just posting it’s all about sending. You can easily segment out your friends and send only to them or just individually. I actually love this because it’s completely personal and it makes sense and very similar to facebook.
facebook allows you to be completely private and pownce walks the line. I really enjoy how there are fans and friends but I wish I could ask to be a fan or make a freind a fan instead. A few of my “friends” aren’t actual friends but I don’t want to remove them. I love the personalization of pownce. Not for interface personalization because there isn’t any but the personalization and segmentation you give to your friends and fans is perfect.
I do see pownce replacing Twitter (for me) on shear feature set, unless Twitter kicks it up a notch but it’s going to take me a long time without being free’d up a little. Since I really don’t want to loose my twitter blog on this site I don’t know what to do, especially since it pownce does replace Twitter here it could handle all the comments. So unless I think of another way to merge the two services (maybe RSS splicing and an RSS module in the sidebar replacing the tweets to the right) it will take a while.
As you can tell I really like pownce and I’ll wait for it to replace anything but I will still use the service and hopefully you’ll join me.
I’m purging my online identity to just a few locations that I actually use since it was getting out of control. The major account escape that led to the purge was myspace, as you might have noticed if I’m a friend of yours. The others include:
On the chopping block
The ones I’ll keep:
There are more but as you can tell there are way to many listed already.
I’ve used a couple managed voicemail providers in the last few months. My first provider was callwave which sent me my voicemails as MP3 through email and just like any voicemail added the ability to call in and hear the voicemail from your phone in a queue. A month or two ago I started using Spinvox after a hearing it briefly on a forgotten tech podcast. It provides voicemail like any other service with a call in queue but where callwave sends you an audio file through email it converts the voicemail to text and emails me. The result is something really cool.
As a BlackBerry user Spinvox provides my voicemail to my phone immediately as text, allowing me to actually respond to any message much faster in a medium I prefer. Even though I love mobile phones I don’t love them to talk or call my voicemail I love them for the the other connections they provide, ie e-mail, text and internet.
Personally I hate voicemail, it’s awfully time consuming. It’s slow, you have to find the time to call in, listen to the voicemail and then you have to call the person for a reply. The message that I receive now is a very good conversion of the audio left in the queue sent through email that I can read whenever I want, in a setting that I want and I could forward it to the caller with a reply.
No matter who it is I just may not be in the setting where it’s appropriate to pick the phone up; I’d say 95% all my voicemails are the result of me not being able to pick the phone up or I simply don’t want to. Now I wait 2-3 minutes for the email to be sent, I read it either on my computer or the phone and I can call them back when I can without calling my voicemail first. The majority of the time it’s just to get an answer to a question so I just text or email them back with a response. It’s extremely productive for me and it helps me not do something I don’t like, being on the phone.
If anyone want’s a Spinvox account contact me. I’m going to e-mail the contact I know over at Spinvox later this week to sign-up a few friends and he’s told me that I can pass along a full list of people to get free 1-year accounts.
If there are any drawbacks to Spinvox it would be:
I might as well complete my planned post about Google apps since a conversation is about to start.
I’ve been in the transition of using Google Apps for the last few weeks for a trial review. Next week I’ll need to decide whether to keep my apps account or stick with the free apps that 
I’m so dependent on. Since the my reasoning for using Google apps is solely based on my use of e-mail and the guaranteed uptime and support I can’t say anything more about the additional features that I plan to never use (start page, talk, etc.).
Although I do use Google Calendar and having that provided uptime is a major plus.
The problems I have with moving to Google apps is the limitation of taking my already existing gmail account. It wasn’t a problem importing my years of email into the new account through gmails provided pop support nor is it a problem emailing in the new account as @gmail, the problem is being dependent on e-mail forwarding with my @gmail.com. I’m not positive but I’m imagining if gmail is not allowing me to login it’s not forwarding my email, then the uptime means nothing.
The only solution is to transition an email change which fully makes sense because I wont be dependent on a service long term. Of course I like having @gmail rather than dan@[anyone of my domains I decide] and not having to tell everyone to update my e-mail more than I distrust Google’s future. I’ll go on record that I still do not feel locked-in but things would be different if I wasn’t so dependent on @gmail.
So for $50 a year isn’t unreasonable to me it’s having to change my e-mail or changing my Talk account. I use Talk daily especially at work where I talk to developers continuesly and I refer to my chat history a lot. It being an excellent BlackBerry app also helps. And chat history is something I can’t forward to my new account so I would have to login to my gmail to retrieve it.
For my Calendar and docs I just exported and imported them without a problem. however I did have to setup the sharing again with Sara since we both manage each others cal.
Only if Google allowed a gmail upgrade service or the integration between a Google app and Google account because that’s really what’s making me hesitant. Its a shame for them since the money isn’t an issue. I can’t guarantee any uptime like that for $4 a month and e-mail is too critical to grovel at. My issues are e-mail forwarding dependency (or having to chang my e-mail address) and not having the gmail history integration for Talk.
It makes me curious why Google Apps doesn’t allow for current gmail upgrades. Are the two services that different that they just couldn’t migrate my account? After my recent GMail outage I signed up for the free beta lasting until the end of this month and noticed all I could do was create an account with a domain. I used scatteredmedia.com and then added my gmail account so it will import all of the e-mails through POP, it’s still downloading them in 200 message chunks. So I could essentially still use my original gmail account by using POP and the send as function built in but I’d loose my address book, calendar and chat history. The chat history and IM change was the deal breaker, I use the chat history a lot since that’s my preferred IM.
It’s been a long time since I used FeedLounge and I’m sad to see the doors closing. It was truely a great app, maybe not the best service but the functionality was everything you’d need out of an online RSS reader.
After hearing I commented on Alex’s site:
Sadly I think the only logical option would be to opensource the project. For everyone to use on their own server and help contribute to fix the bugs and increase the overall functionality. Then if Scott wants to host feedlounge it could be ad supported or a paid hosted service.
I remember the days when fl had so much of my attention. Like Chris after you left it lost it’s appeal and GR launched it’s new UI.
I’m sure he’s not only spent a lot of time but a fair share of money so the open source solution while attractive for us may not be an option for the committed. However, I’m interested to see how much Scott gets or even wants.
