Google recently updated PageRanks
Posted 2008-05-01 09:47 AMI am a bit late on this (by a couple days) but Google recently rolled out another PageRank update. For webmasters, PageRank updates can be a bit like Christmas. That is when you check your important sites to see if your strategies paid off. For this site it matters about as much as the Alexa update (none) but it is interesting to track anyways. The PageRank for this site jumped from zero to four. Not too bad. That is as far as I am going to go into PageRank because there are far better places to read up on the subject.
Did you notice a big change in your Alexa rating?
Posted 2008-04-18 12:53 AMI am not a huge fan of Firefox extensions because Firefix is already a memory hog before adding yet more overhead with possibly poorly written 3rd party extensions. However, I do have what I believe are important web master tools. That is Firebug, Web Developer, Google Toolbar and the Alexa Toolbar.
Of the above, Alexa might not be considered essential by many people but I like having it available to get some measure of how much traffic a site receives. The toolbar is also good for giving a little love to the people you visit often. Because part of the Alexa rankings come from users with the toolbar installed every visit I make to a site gives that site just a little bit of a Northerly jump in the Alexa graph.
Unfortunately Alexa is not highly accurate. Some people even go so far as to call Alexa totally worthless because the site only tracks toolbar users. That means sites with a heavy base of tech-minded visitors will tend to rank higher than a site with non-tech users. The reason is that tech-minded users are more likely to have the toolbar installed.
Today I woke up to a huge change in my Alexa rankings. Apparently the culprit is explained by this announcement at their site. Alexa is now pulling data from multiple sources to calculate their rankings.
This is a great move because hopefully it will give some value to rankings which are often all over the map. Though my site took a huge jump I noticed that many higher ranked sites stayed about the same. This seems about right because sites with lower traffic are probably harder to track than others because less data is coming in from the little guys.
Did your rankings take a jump too?
Happy stay away from the web day
Posted 2008-04-01 07:45 AMI call today “stay away from the web day” because April Fool’s day has to be the most annoying day for the web. I get pretty much all of my news and information from the web and on April 1st everything is suspect. Usually I get totally fooled on the first story before I realize what day it is. Today is a good day to unplug. You have been warned!
Web hosting just got more interesting
Posted 2008-03-27 01:52 PMAmazon EC2 and S3 are perhaps the most recognizable offerings in the so called cloud computing space. The EC2 service offers a utility pricing model for a slice of a dedicated server. Each EC2 instance is a Xen based Virtual Private Server (VPS) with several options for server space and RAM.
Of course EC2 has become an interesting option for people in need of cheap dedicated hosting space for whatever needs. EC2 has been particularly useful for the option of starting up any number of servers within minutes and dismissing them at any time. If a customer starts an EC2 instance for one hour, the bill is ten cents. This is true utility hosting.
Unfortunately there have been a number of deal breakers for using EC2 as a general hosting option. Probably the most common complaints have been over a lack of persistent storage (data vanishes if the instance dies,) no option for geographic redundancy (no method of ensuring that two different instances could run in different data centers) and the lack of a dedicated IP address (IP is reallocated randomly when instance dies.)
Of these problems there was really only one major road block for most people. The lack redundant storage could be dealt with by using creative strategies to squirrel the data to S3. Though geographic redundancy is nice, not everyone employs such precautions because doing so runs up the hosting bill. The one major problem that there was no real easy way to get around was the lack of static IP addressing.
A dedicated IP address is extremely important for hosting. DNS servers need an IP address to associate with your domain. Previously only a DNS solution typically used for home based dynamic IP addressing could be used to get around this problem. Secure certificates which are used for running things like shopping carts and secure logins also need to be associated with a static IP address. These are the major reasons but the list goes on.
Now, Amazon has squashed some of these problems. New instances can now be started in a number of (I see three options right now) availability zones which are insulated from each other. That means a data center failure in one zone won’t affect an instance in another zone. This feature could be used as a solution to the problem of geographic redundancy. At this point I am not sure where these zones are located but I believe at least one of them is in Europe.
The other new feature which is the most exciting to me is the Elastic IP address offering. An IP address can be allocated to your account until you explicitly release it and it appears that you can have as many addresses as you like. The IP address can be associated with any instance or to none at all. IP addresses which are allocated to an instance are free but those which are not allocated are billed at one cent per hour which works out to $7.20 per month.
Unfortunately there is one big caveat to the new IP addresses. From what I can see, an instance can only be allocated one IP address at a time. This still gives EC2 users all the benefits mentioned above, but webmasters will have to setup each site with a secure certificate on a separate instance (and running another $72 per month for the instance.) There are work-arounds to this problem, but I am not sure that any of them are in wide enough usage to be trusted at this time.
Overall, these new additions bring down some walls for a lot of people and makes Amazon web services a much more solid option. These features have been often requested from day one, thank you Amazon for finally coming through.
Read the announcement from Amazon.
CodeIgniter for Ruby?
Posted 2008-03-17 04:09 AMCalm down, nobody is building a CodeIgniter for Ruby, but I think I found a close equivalent. First some background on why I am writing this entry.
When the Ruby mad rush began with the Rails “build a blog in 15 minutes” video was posted to the net I have to admit that I was impressed. But I was impressed more with Ruby than the Rails framework. I dug the syntax and some things about Ruby such as “everything is an oject” appealed to me. Unfortunately what did not appeal to me was the lack of documentation and the difficulty of setting up a good hosting environment. I had also not been much of a programmer and even installing Rails on my local Linux machine was a huge pain. I barely knew Linux and I only wrote snippets of PHP. Rather than picking up Ruby and running with it I continued with homework and fiddling with ExpressionEngine as a hobby.
Approximately a year after the Rails 15 minute video, Rick Ellis posted his own 20 minute video for a PHP framework called CodeIgniter. I was on it immediately and I even made the first community post to the forum, Rick made web apps fun to write in PHP. Some time later that year I was hired by pMachine to do technical support on the forums. I then began doing ExpressionEngine freelance work on the side (and now full time after leaving Ellislab.) With all these changes I went from being okay with PHP to good enough to do what I needed to get things done with PHP. Today I am busy building ExpressionEngine modules and I even created this blog in CodeIgniter.
My fascination with Ruby never left though. I just couldn’t get into Rails because it felt like it was everything that CodeIgniter was not. Rails got in the way and seemed to require too much configuration. The bells and whistles didn’t seem worth the hassle. By contrast, CodeIgniter did just what I needed it to, provided great documentation and it was built by a bald headed CEO whom I am very fond of. I largely learned PHP from CodeIgniter and now I am looking to learn Ruby much the same way.
There seems to be a large number of Ruby frameworks popping up lately. One upstart which many call “a better Rails than Rails” is Merb. Unfortunately, Merb seems to be too much like Rails even if it is a “better Rails.” I tried other frameworks such as Camping and Sinatra which are small and simple but seem to lack the community and documentation of CodeIgniter. Finally, I think I have found a winner, and the framework is called Ramaze.
Ramaze, like CodeIgniter, is lightweight, flexible and seems to be gaining some momentum. Ramaze is not as polished, the site is not as pretty, the documentation is not as complete and the community is not as active (running on Google groups) but all the main components are there. With the examples I was able to get a simple blog up in minutes. I posted my first blog entry using using the Sequel ORM (like CodeIgniter’s active record library), displayed the output with the Erubis templating system and ran the actual framework with Mongrel (Ruby web server.) One of the things that makes Ramaze so flexible is that it allows developers to choose from a list of popular ORM’s, templating systems and web servers.
Ruby itself is also great because there are a ton of libraries available for the language which takes care of common needs. I have had to do a lot of searching on the PHP side to take care of things that are shipped with Ruby by default. Also, because of the popularity of Ruby I can count on a Ruby library being available for new API’s.
So now after just one weekend I am well on my way to learning Ruby. That does not mean I will be packing up my PHP world to settle in Ruby. My bread still comes from the CodeIgniter and ExpessionEngine communities but learning Ruby will only help my PHP skills. The Ruby world has great ideas which was partly an inspiration for CodeIgniter. Other things like Capistrano and Erubis can also be used with PHP. Ramaze is helping me with Ruby just as CodeIgniter helped me with PHP. Both are great frameworks which I will be using in the future. Thanks for the developers of each!
What will ExpressionEngine 2.0 look like? And a friendly wager!
Posted 2008-03-13 03:24 AMAfter the SXSW buzz over ExpressionEngine 2.0 wore off I pondered over my previous post and I felt that many of my ideas were very assumptive. I could be right on some of them or I could be so far off that I may look back at that post one day and laugh.
What will ExpressionEngine 2.0 really look like? Interestingly, a related question has been often asked as long as the CodeIgniter framework has existed. This related question is answered every day as developers work on projects using CodeIgniter. The related question - what should a CMS built on CodeIgniter look like? Answering the latter should give us some idea on how to answer the former and that is where the friendly wager comes into play.
The friendly wager.
I propose to the CodeIgniter community that we present our ideas of what ExpressionEngine will look like. As a contest, we could come up with individual ideas or form small groups. Whatever we do, we should keep the number of participants low, like maybe five presentations. Each presentation will be charged a low entrance fee which will go to the winner. At the end of the contest the presentations will be judged via a simple poll in the CodeIgniter forums.
The contest should be start soon and the presentations should be finished quickly because big details could be released at any time by Ellislab. A presentation does not have to use any code or go into excruciating detail, all it has to do is win! The judging may ultimately not be fair or totally democratic, but the process and the ideas is the main goal of the contest.
These rules can change based on input. At this point I believe the question should be answered from a developers perspective. Will CodeIgniter go through significant changes? How will modules fit into the system? How will templates be handled? But a presentation can take any form.
If the contest does not take off then I will write up my own presentation in a future post. If it does take off then I will update this post with the discussion thread. Stay tuned!
A designers dream becomes a developers dream
Posted 2008-03-09 05:05 AMThis weekend at SXSW, Ellislab has been giving a limited presentation on ExpressionEngine 2.0. There are no official dumps of information available and details can change but what has been coming out so far is quite huge. Here are the points that I feel are most important for me to make in my view of these updates (note: with few details available, some of these points may be based on false assumptions.)
1. There will be much more crossover between the ExpressionEngine and CodeIgniter communities. Currently there are remarkably few developers who have made much of a crossover splash. In other words, there are likely more people than we know crossing the lines, but there has been little open evidence of this.
2. My second point is a much stronger implication to go with the first point. There will be many more ExpressionEngine coders available. A search of the EE forums has shown frustration with the lack of developers available for ExpressionEngine. Developers in the pro network are often unavailable and many of them are designers rather than coders. An integration of CodeIgniter will open the barrier between the developer heavy CodeIgniter community and the designer heavy ExpressioEngine community. Designer, meet coder!
3. CodeIgniter essentially gets a huge boost in the number of available libraries. If ExpressionEngine components can run on CodeIgniter without the entire ExpressionEngine CMS then CodeIgniter will be in the somewhat unique position of being a framework with highly refined finished products available from paid developers (such as a forum, wiki and even a CMS.)
4. CodeIgniter becomes the engine! The ExpressionEngine community knows that Ellislab has gone through some big restructuring with recent versions of ExpressionEngine. The company’s name changed from ExpressionEngine to Ellislab and the flagship product took a small step back from the spotlight. Now the company is about Ellislab and an umbrella of products, not just the CMS. Now the company may go through another big restructuring process, though not as big as the last one. Considering that ExpressionEngine modules will be decoupled and become almost stand-alone products (running on the new “engine“) ExpressionEngine will now take another step back from the spotlight while the importance of CodeIgniter moves forward. I am very interested to see how the packaging and branding will look when the final result is revealed.
5. For all those people asking how to build a CMS in CodeIniter, your question will be answered in a big way!
The rest of the updates seem to be more on par with previous big updates but not so groundbreaking. Overall this will also be a nice refresh to the code base. At this point the system is four years old and still on a 1.x branch. ExpressionEngine was getting to be a little dated and this newest update will put the problem of dating to rest. From here, due to the more modular approach (even core libraries can be replaced in CodeIgniter) I can see the system continuously being refactored by both Ellislab and the community into a bright new future. Next stop, PHP 5.
Problems?
This will not be an immediate upgrade for many people and I can see the release being a huge headache. I wonder if Ellislab will continue to support the 1.x branch. Anyone using 3rd party add-ons will be left in the dark until features provided by those add-ons are dealt with (perhaps this will be an opening for EE developers to make some cash doing upgrade work.) Some add-ons won’t be needed but there will still be work to implement the features in the new version of EE. Developers with a large client base using EE will likely be keeping old clients on the 1.x branch for quite some time. The more reliance on hacks and crazy structures to get around old limitations, the more pain there will be in upgrading. Developers with many supported add-ons will need to ramp up for more support and coding work. Some of these developers may not have solutions ready right away. Mitchell, I am looking at you!
Licensing issues will also be interesting. I will be interested to see if I can develop applications using a hybrid of Ellislab paid products and CodeIgniter which would currently violate the license (social networks using a custom blog system but the Ellislab forum module.)
This all sounds very exciting. I am happy to see CodeIgniter become more important rather than falling off the side. I’m sure there will be restrictions and limitations which will dampen my enthusiasm though but right now all we can do is wait and see. Actually, who is waiting? I have work to do! Back to ExpressionEngine 1.6.2!
Tech books will not make you rich
Posted 2008-03-01 06:14 AMI have always wondered how much money authors of text books bring in for their efforts. According to Peter Cooper, author of Beginning Ruby from Apress, the answer is not much.
I will leave the details up to the site but apparently the money he has been bringing in is not enough to live on for even the best quarter, but perhaps a nice bump to regular income.
Ruby is popular and Apress is a great publisher. I buy books from Apress often. This book is probably a good seller compared to the more relatively unknown niche areas of development. Peter’s insights are enough to turn me off to the idea of ever writing a tech book.
I am not sure why anyone would even go through the effort. Perhaps boasting about literally writing the book on Ruby might be good for consulting prospects but that seems to be a lot of effort for little return. But then, so is college and at least he actually got paid for the book.
Much thanks to Peter for sharing this.
Playing with Heroku
Posted 2008-02-29 02:54 AMI am not a Ruby developer but I have recently stumbled on a great Rails developer tool. Heroku is a hosted Rails environment sitting on Amazon EC2 web services. The application (a Ycombinator graduate currently in beta) allows for push button setup of a Rails instance which is ready to go immediately. I am not going to go into much details on the application since they can be viewed at the site but this application shows off an exciting convergence of some really cool technologies. Try out the beta, if nothing else, you can get free Rails hosting to play with.
Edited to add: Leave a comment if you would like an invite from me.
Added an RSS feed
Posted 2008-02-22 01:49 AMYikes, I can’t follow a blog without an RSS feed so I don’t expect anyone stumbling across my site to be any different. I coded up (copy/paste) a custom (stolen) solution for feeding RSS off my blog posts. The inspiration (theft) came from Derek Allard’s great post on adding a feed to a CodeIgniter blog. At least I built the blog myself! Thanks Derek.
It rolls down stairs, alone or in pairs...
Posted 2008-02-17 11:43 PMRolls over your neighbors dog! It’s blog, blog, blog!
Here it is folks, what everyone in this audience of two (assuming the dog counts, because he is my best friend looking after my best interests.) After weeks of working on a custom CMS for my blog I am finally finished!
The CMS has been built using the CodeIgniter framework from Ellislab. The front-end is using the YUI CSS framework and the back-end is using the Blueprint CSS framework. Soon the back-end will be stocked to the gills with goodies tools from the ExtJS Javascript framework. If you have not got the hint yet, much of the reason for building this system in the first place was for experimentation and getting exposure to new skills. Unfortunately one of those skills is not design. I am using a a modified Scribblish template and it works for now.
For those who know me (my pretend audience) I know which questions you have on your mind. Why CodeIgniter? You are an ExpressionEngine guru right? Why not ExpressionEngine? I have been working every day for about the past year and a half or more in ExpressionEngine. I have no reason to doubt that I will be working in ExpressionEngine every day for the coming year as well. As already mentioned, much of the reason for building a new CMS was to beef up my capabilities as a developer. There is no better way to understand a CMS than by building one yourself.
But there are other reasons. CodeIgniter is a great framework which fills a need. Many of the great applications I use every day violate the ExpressionEngine license. These sites are also not a market for which ExpressionEngine is targeted for. A development team looking to build the next Twitter or Facebook (as if we need another one) is probably not looking at ExpressionEngine as a basis for their project. Where ExpressionEngine makes little sense, CodeIgniter just might be perfect.
I will likely also be using the system as a jumping point for other projects of my own interest. Creating a database driven system is much easier when you have bits and pieces you can steal from another working system. I suppose this is sort of like a framework upon a framework. Like a potatoe, it’s all about the layers. Or is that a beet? Celery?
Oh, and please don’t try too hard to break my little app. If you see any bugs, please report them with the contact form. Thanks and check back often as I will be posting ExpressionEngine tips and help when I get the chance to post. Lastly, click on the title of this post to leave a comment!
