Archive for the ‘websites’ Category
The Mad Editor’s Round-Up #2.5
Written by John Erianne on January 7, 2009 – 2:30 pm -Okay, here’s a carnival submit that came in late and didn’t quite make the recent addition. I decided not to wait for another full edition because it’s just too funny. It seems that actress, Gwyneth Paltrow has her very own website — something called GOOP. Anyway, read Katy Evans Bush’s GOOP: for eight-year-olds. posted at Baroque in Hackney. Katy adds in her carnival submission, “Hi, I’m a poet and freelance copywriter living in London; I’m sending you this post I wrote, in which I analyzed this crazy website Gwyneth Paltrow has set up, in light of my own need to make a website, and in light of potential site users. I hope you like it; I’d love to be in your blog carnival! I really like your blog, I’ve bookmarked it.”
After reading Katy’s post, visit GP’s site and see if you don’t think it is one of the most retarded things you’ve ever witnessed (Paltrow’s site, not Katy’s blog, which is quite excellent).
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Performance Testing for High Traffic Community, Forum and Publishing Sites
Written by John Erianne on January 5, 2009 – 9:09 pm -Content may be king, but what’s a kingdom without without it’s vassals? In other words, no matter how good your content, any problems you may have in delivering that content may drive away your visitors/consumers. That’s why, as your website grows you may, at some point, benefit from performance or Load Testing.
A performance testing service will typically offer website monitoring or network monitoring to see how your networks, apps, and databases operate under stress and watches for any problems that can monkey up the works. This type of testing can be very important for site that have a lot of concurrent users — such as social networking sites, discussion forums, e-commerce sites, auction sites, and CMS-driven publisher sites with a ton of subscribers. performance testing typically will generate virtual user groups and run them through a system under varying conditions to see if the website meets it’s performance goals and checks for traffic bottlenecks and other problems that can prevent a website from living up to it’s full potential.
If you host your site on your own webservers, you can purchase a decent load testing software program for less than what it costs to by most publishing software. And if you don’t own the servers where your website is hosted, there are plenty of private companies you can contract for a reasonable fee. Some web hosts even provide these services.
I Resolve to Resolve These Resolutions
Written by John Erianne on January 3, 2009 – 10:36 am -Okay . . . New Year’s Day is over — back to the subject of New Year’s Resolutions. My own resolutions for 2009 consist mainly of resolutions I didn’t keep in 2008, plus one new one that wasn’t an issue for me in January 2008, but is in January of 2009.
Of the stuff that I didn’t achieve in 2008, the most pressing has to be updating/redesigning all my websites including this blog. In theory, I can build my own websites from scratch, but haven’t actually done so in almost 3 years. During that time, I’ve been either relying on pre-made templates or making do with an old design. In 2006, things started to get away from me. My health situtation dominated most of my time and concern throughout 2006 and 2007 so I just didn’t maintain any of my websites. And, in 2008, despite my best intentions, I was too broke, too lazy and too distracted to do much upkeep so, again, nothing got done. In 2009, I really want to change that. The problem with using pre-made templates designed by someone else is that they don’t really meet a publisher’s needs 100% because they aren’t specifically designed for you. I’m not saying that I’ll stop using templates altogether because I have a bunch of websites and I don’t have the time to redesign all of them from scratch, but a few of them need some tender loving care that only a complete and personal overhaul can solve. I can’t say I’m not intimidated by this. I don’t consider myself to be a great web designer. I’m completely self-taught. I’ve learned things through trial and error (mostly error) over the last decade and the thought of spending hours and hours working with source code when I’d rather be writing other things bugs the shit out of me. On the other hand, being as it would likely cost me between $1500-$2000 to hire someone to design just one website/blog (and with me being broke and in debt with an army of empty suits demanding their pound of flesh) my only option besides using templates is to do it myself. And really, it’s true, the only way to get things done the exact way you want them is to do it yourself.
The second big resolution is to submit more of my own writing to publishers. I submitted very little of my writing in 2008. This blog has taken up a lot of my time lately. It’s not that I haven’t written other things. I have. I just haven’t gone to much effort, once I’ve written them, to see that someone publishes them. There’s only so many hours in a day to write, write this blog, promote this blog, read stuff submitted to me by others, partake in the endless cycle of sleep/eat/shit/etc. — who has time to research markets and target submissions hither and yon? It’d be great if I could make submissions telepathically. That’d be a real time saver (although, I suspect, those same bastards who don’t accept email submissions probably wouldn’t be too keen on telepathy, ya think?).
The third big thing to address is my weight (no pun intended). A year ago, gaining weight was one of my New Year’s Resolutions for 2008. After cancer, treatments for cancer and going for so long without being able to eat solid food, I looked like a concentration camp survivor. Last year, I was, therefore, on a 3500 calorie a day, high protein diet. Unfortunately, once I got back to my normal wight in June 2008, I just couldn’t stop eating (and I don’t even want to tell you about all the crap I was eating during the holidays!). So, my resolution for 2009 is to lose weight. One of my Christmas gifts was a gym membership (a hint and a half for my fat ass, I guess) and I resolve to use it.
There you have it: my resolutions for 2008: 1) redesign websites 2) make more effort to get writing published 3) lost weight
Pretty simple and straight forward. No impossible superhuman multi-page list signed in blood this year. Just something plausible. My lazy, dumb ass’s fault if I don’t even manage one of these items.
