And so, as from this week I am now hosted on a sparkly new, lightning fast Linode VPS (feel free to register with that link and I get a free months hosting! w00t!). It comes with everything you’d expect from a VPS, including some of the most responsive and helpful customer service I’ve ever had the pleasure of dealing with (see here). Its also hosted in London, so although my US visitors may not be seeing the same speed I am, my UK visitors should be seeing a HUGE performance boost. Even then, the response time from the US to my UK Linode is still faster than from a US ISP to my old US based Media Temple host, so everybody wins.

But the best part is the price. You get a fair bit for an unbelievable price compared to similar service offered by VPS hosts such as 1&1, and you even get the added bonus of being able to choose what OS you use from a fairly comprehensive list.

And so I embark on my Linode adventure. May our sordid love affair be a long and pleasurable one.

Unfortunately I spotted it a few minutes before I was due to leave Leeds for Glasgow for a couple of days, so I don’t have time to fix it.

Sorry to anyone who’s tried to contact me over the past couple of days!

Edit: Now fixed.

Up to now I’d followed a similar pattern of design, so this time I’ve gone all out to mix things up. Gone is the black text on a white background, gone are the heavy layout graphics on every page and gone are the ridiculous sidebars that span 9 or 10 screens down.

Key differences are:

• A completely reworked homepage, designed to take put some of the focus onto the rest of my online life. I’m posting a lot of photos at the moment, both on momentile and flickr (for the dailyshoot project) and I’ve always played a lot of xbox, so it made sense to have all of those featured at the front of the site. That along with my blog posts, my mobile blog and the place I seem to spend a lot more of my time nowadays, Twitter. Last.fm and a latest projects section will be added soon.
• The all over “dark” look. Its something I’ve really fallen for over the last year and this was the perfect opportunity to see what I could do with a black/grey colour scheme. I’m still not sure how well the link colour works against the shade of grey used in the background, so either of these may well change in the next few weeks depending on how much they bug me.
• A smaller header/logo etc. After checking the old site on an 800×600 resolution I developed a sympathy with people that were forced to see nothing but my site logo and a title on every page load, so now there’s a lot more visible above the fold.
• A brand spanking new 404 page, starring the gorgeous Lissa. Thanks for modelling for me!

I also had to write a couple of plugins to get the homepage looking the way I wanted it, running alongside my Momentile on WordPress plugin (shameless plug). Most notably the Xbox recent games plugin took a bit of research to get the info I needed, so once I get some time to tidy up the code and add an options page I’ll get it released.

And thats about it. Hopefully the design won’t start pissing me off in a few weeks, and I can go another 18 months without getting “the itch”!

Media Temple have pointed me in the direction of my DB, and told me to check out my Slow_queries figure which was unexpectedly high. Although I know for something to be classed as a slow query, it has to take longer than an amount of time you set. I’m not sure what they have set long_query_time to, so I don’t know if thats a red herring or not.

But considering I only get 200-300 hits a day and use WordPress, which is a massively popular (and actively maintained) open source cms/blogging engine, it seems strange that the hundreds of other people I’ve encountered who combine WordPress with Media Temple don’t experience the same problems.

Seeing as theres no way to upgrade the Grid-Service package without moving up to a £50 a month deal, it looks like it might be time to start looking at other options – which is a shame, because I still maintain Media Temple have the best customer services of any host Ive ever dealt with.

And thanks to Dave, I’ve been sporting a shiny new Linode VPS for the past couple of months and I have to admit from what Ive seen its been lightning fast. I installed WP and copied the databases over, then did some rather crude side-by-side loading tests. I managed to load 3 pages on the linode before Media Temple could even serve me my homepage, so I think the next step will be to move this site to there. Its meant having to do some reading on how to lock down my properly VPS for hosting public sites, but I’m sure the guys at work will be able to fill me in on anything I need to know that I don’t already. (Thanks in advance Dan, Jimmy)

The upside is that if I pull it off, aside from the obvious speed benefits, I can cancel my Media Temple hosting and save myself £15 a month. Ah well, that’ll pay for 3 footlong Subway BMTs if nothing else.

p.s. – the link to Linode is my referral link, so feel free to click through if you’re thinking of giving it a go – its worth a free months hosting to me if you stay with them for a few months

Well I had a look last night, and it looks like I’ve cracked the 100,000 page view mark! Not that brilliant when you consider the site I spend my days developing for has seen up to 350 hits a second at peak times – but still, for a blog/portfolio thats only been around 17 months its not a bad milestone.

Thats the second back-patting post I’ve written in a row. I’ll get back to writing about something semi-interesting soon, I swear…

But for now, I leave you with my Google Analytics graph: May 4th 2007 -> October 11th 2008

The most comedy part of this change is that after my Fitness First rants over the past 2 months, I now rank top 15 in a Google search for Fitness First!! Consumer power!

All that in 16 months blogging. Nice! I’ve become walking advertisement that designing your site with a bit of simple SEO in mind can make a world of difference – even if the stuff you write is mostly crap. hehehe.

The bad side? The pressures on to keep doing what I’ve been doing. Damn. I should have guessed I’d never be able to convince myself to leave the site as “just a portfolio”

I loved it, but it was time for a change. For one thing I have an itchy trigger finger, and I was screaming out to showcase some of the design/seo/usability tricks Ive picked up over the past 2 years (credit in part to the Web Design & Development forum I help moderate). But the main reason was the speed … looking at the plugins I was using, plus the work I’d done myself on the site, I was including 3 separate JS frameworks on every page load, 3-4 stylesheets (depending on the page), etc etc, all from the same domain. I had some reports of waiting 30 seconds for the page to load.

So my first task was to choose a framework and run with it – so from now, all my JS dev work will be on jQuery! Next was to split some of the content images and JS away from HTML and CSS in terms of the domain it was being served from to hopefully lower the loading time a little. I’ll see how this pans out, and if its a benefit I’ll work through and move some of my older images.

The design… well, that was a lot more difficult. Like I said, I loved my old design so I didn’t want anything radically different, but it was limiting in its current state… I designed it to accommodate 800×600 screens easily, so the actual content area was tiny. So for v3, I decided that while I would still design the content area to fit in 800×600, anyone still using such an ancient screen resolution will need to scroll a little to get it in view… this allowed me to stretch the container boundaries a little further out, giving me a lot more space to work with. Nice.

My other main concern was the plugin execution speed, which seemed to be adding a few seconds onto the execution time. I fixed that by dropped a few plugins and stripping a few others down and integrating them directly into my theme, which seems to have made a world of difference.

The inspiration… lol… actually came from a Government form, although right now exactly which one escapes me… if I remember I’ll add a photo of it here. But the key was that the back page of the form was just a big box, with the words “Write any further comments in the box below”. From that I got the idea of a huge blank canvas to work with – something where if I wanted I could just have a big whitespace to put content on. Remove the sidebars, add an extra, whatever. So I decided to move the logo, menu etc outside of the “canvas” area and give it more of a solid look. It may not make much sense now, but, for example, I’m working on a flickr photo album that looks brilliant when its spanned across the entire white box… they’re the sort of projects where I’m hoping it’ll pay off.

So to anyone who stumbles by, hope you enjoy the new look. And if you come across any bugs – let me know!

Now, off to fix some IE issues and work out what I did to break the ajax comments… :/

But seriously, I was pretty amazed. I still remember about a year ago I used to wait a week or more for Googlebot to stop back after I’d posted something, now it doesn’t ever seem to be less than 12 hours.

I’d like to think it was down to the sheer volume of quality content posted on this blog :chuckle: but I suspect my role in this may have been minimal… but its amazing to think that Google can get to an ickle site like mine within 15 minutes, when theres something like 172 million sites to crawl around the world.

So good work Google. Whatever you’re throwing money at to get that sort of indexing speed, its working

Either way, it now seems to be working – although how much longer I’ll be using it for I don’t know. I’m tempted to write my own – using community plugins are great, but you have to put an awful lot of trust into them and when a situation like this comes up and you realise you have no clue how it works and no time to find out, you just have to hope that renaming the folder, deactivation and reactivation will fix it. Thankfully, this time it did!

So apologies to anyone trying to download any plugins or themes from this site over the past – maybe 7 days? I’ll try not to let it happen again!

First – is it sensible to have something like “reset all DNS settings to default” available to run from the querystring? What I mean is, rather than using a standard POST (ie, you click a button, it submits a form and does the job), they use a GET – so by “accidently” navigating to /services/manage/zone/edit.mt?act=reset_to_default&domain=mou.me.uk (from within the Media Temple control panel), all your DNS settings (assuming you’ve changed them) will be reset. Admittedly, this was a huge cock-up on my part, but in true arrogant fashion I’m going to blame Media Temple for this one! Like the saying goes – give a monkey a gun and wait for him to shoot himself (perhaps I made that saying up…)

Update: I submitted this as a big report and its now been fixed. A POST is now required to reset DNS settings to default.

Second – and this is a huge pet hate of mine – plain text passwords. After struggling to get FTP to work for a short while earlier, I went to the users page to reset my password and I see this:

That pissed me off a little, but not nearly as much as the email I got from Media Temple support a few minutes later (after I’d reported the FTP problem)

Chris,

In regards to your issue with FTP login,

I was successfully able to login via FTP into your server. To connect, please use the following settings.

Host: mou.me.uk
Username: xxxxxxxxxxx
Pass: xxxxxxxxxx
Port: 21
Passive mode ENABLED

(obviously I’ve XXX’d out the actual username/password!)

So not only is my password stored in plain text, but any of the support staff can get hold of it?? Urgh. Bad show Media Temple.

But, for the sake of a fair and balanced post, I’d like to point out that neither of these issues are anywhere near enough to take away from the fact that Media Temple are an amazing web host, for speed, reliability (from what Ive seen so far) and general ease of use. I’d still recommend them.