Web

I’ve been experimenting with discussion lists at worldbeatplanet, but I’m not at all happy with my web host’s setup.

They have a very brain-damaged Mailman installation that always appends the domain name to the list name and there’s no way to get rid of it. If I create listname@worldbeatplanet.com, the name ends up being listname-worldbeatplanet.com@worldbeatplanet.com with no way to change it and that’s the name the members actually see even though it also has shorter aliases. That’s just plain unacceptable as far as I’m concerned.

I joined Apple’s iTunes Affiliate program when it was announced. It just got more useful now that they allow links to individual items. I added a page at WorldBeatPlanet with direct links to albums by the artists I mention there.

I now have all of my sites running at Dreamhost and everything seems to be running smoothly. My bandwidth limit is now 64G/month vs. 20G/month at my previous host and is shared by all of my domains. With my old host, I had to allocate a fixed portion of the bandwidth & disk space to each domain.

I had a hard time getting the database for WorldBeatPlanet. After the crash, they initially restored a backup from June, but I finally got them to restore a newer backup, which I copied to the new site.

PEHosting had a major crash yesterday and some data was lost. No posts from my weblog were lost, but everything posted at MacMegasite since Friday is gone. They completely screwed up WorldBeatPlanet, losing all changes since June.

I’m now in the process of moving everything to Dreamhost. It’s about $1/month less than PEHosting and it gives me a little more disk space (which I really didn’t need) and more than 3x the bandwidth. However it’s not a reseller account. Instead of having each site separate and allocated a fixed amount of space & bandwidth, all of the sites share the same space & bandwidth.

After reading Jon’s weblog entry, I decided to try Bloglines and I love it. Before Bloglines, I was subscribed to 140 feeds in NetNewsWire and found that I couldn’t keep up with the new items.

Since there are only a few feeds I need to monitor continuously, such as VersionTracker & a few Mac news sites, I now subscribe to those feeds in NetNewsWire and read everything else in Bloglines.

As you’ve probably noticed, my site has a new look. The weblog is now integrated with the rest of the site.

I’ve just installed the latest Firefox and found a pleasant surprise. For any web site with RSS links in the header, it will display little RSS icon in the bottom right corner of the window. When you click the RSS icon, it will add a bookmark folder for that site containing the items in the RSS feed.

I was just invited to stumbleupon, a new social networking site I wasn’t aware of until now. It requires FireFox because it uses an extension to ‘stumble’ on new sites.

I have a couple of GMail invites. Drop me a note if you want one.