The Case for Cloud Hosting
My internet connection had been crawling the past few days. I’ve checked with my DSL provider, and my account seems fine. And for some reason, it’s not with all websites that I’m having difficulties. Then I just recently learned that an earthquake has caused faults in undersea cables connecting my region to the rest of the world. This means that accessing certain websites running on servers on the other side of the globe will be slower. Being in the Asia Pacific, this supposedly meant most sites out there, with the popularity of inexpensive US-based datacenters.
Still, I can access my Gmail without much fuss. Google searches return results at the usual super-fast speeds. And then I remember that Google uses multiple datacenters spread around the world. When you run a Google search, chances are you get directed to the datacenter nearest you. This is advantageous in at least two ways. First, you get faster access time, since data packets travel through shorter distances. Second, you are assured of service even if communication through the the main line gets severed or disrupted.
Shouldn’t your blog be running on a similar setup?
I had recently moved some of my blogs into a new web host, and one of the things I had to think about was whether to go for traditional hosting or those cloud hosting services like Rackspace Cloud (previously Mosso). Cloud hosting essentially does what Google does with its datacenters–it distributes the load across servers in different locations.
So assuming your website is in a cloud hosting setup, you are more or less assured of service, even if there are traffic spikes and server outages. If you’ve been fortunate to have been frontpaged on popular social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious, you’ve probably experienced some server downtime either due to the sheer number of visits, or a bandwidth exceeded error on your account. And even if it’s not your site that experiences this slowdown, if another site hosted on the same shared server gets massive traffic, then chances are your site will also slow down.
Is cloud hosting for everyone?
Considering the scenarios above, I can say that cloud hosting is not necessarily ideal for everyone. For one, there are cost considerations. Cloud hosting companies don’t usually charge a flat rate per month. Rather, they charge based on usage: bandwidth, space and even CPU cycles used. If you have a small audience, you might be better off in a less-expensive shared hosting environment. And if a good majority of your audience is located in one place, then you may not have to worry about undersea cables failing.
However, if you are planning to run a web application in which uptime is an absolute must, you should consider cloud hosting. This would also be the case if you run a really popular blog with a decent-sized audience. Or perhaps you are planning to start small, but you foresee the need to scale in the near future–then in this case cloud hosting might be right for you.
From what I’ve read, some hosting companies are moving to cloud-based setups, but some are still holding out, focusing on improving their traditional hosting business. What’s important for me is that consumers have a choice, based on need, budget and opportunities for growth.
Tablet Input: Helpful for Blogging?
I just finished writing a review of the Adesso CyberTablet Z12 on Forever Geek, where I took a look at the tablet, comparing it to other devices in its class, and it made me wonder if a drawing tablet could be useful for blogging.
I usually try to stick to only things that I can easily adopt and use as part of my blogging duties, and so I wasn’t too impressed with what I, as a blogger specifically, could do with a tablet input system.
This doesn’t have any effect on my review of the tablet, as I found the Z12 to be a great product, but what could I use it for on a daily basis?
It has the ability to convert writing into text using handwriting recognition, but I type faster than I can hand write a sentence (in part because writing with a stylus or pen is a one handed experience, and typing is a two handed one).
Even if the handwriting recognition was perfect, which it isn’t due to my horrible chicken-scratch, it would still take me longer to pen out an entry than typing it on my computer.
For doing mock-ups of designs, annotating pictures and drawings, and doing other simple editing tasks, I found the tablet to be helpful, but I don’t do these things every day, and I don’t have a very still hand, leading to graphics that aren’t as clean as I’d like them to be.
Sure, the technology is great, but I feel like for blogging, there isn’t much that beats a keyboard and mouse. Hopefully, this doesn’t erupt into the same kind of battle people see with console gamers (game pad users) versus keyboard and mouse users, but do you have any input device that you enjoy for blogging above and beyond the keyboard and mouse?
Review: Using the iPhone OS 3.0 for blogging
A few months ago, just after the upgraded iPhone operating system was announced, I speculated on whether iPhone OS 3.0 would make the iPhone a better blogging platform, basing my article purely on the specifications Apple provided.
Now that iPhone 3.0 has arrived, here are my initial thoughts on whether the iPhone is good for performing a variety of common blogging/social media tasks.
Blogging
A number of applications already exist to integrate with popular blogging platforms such as WordPress and Movable Type, and it’s possible to access most admin panels via the Safari web browser.
The main improvement here is the ability to use the landscape keyboard in more applications, though it should be noted that a number of third-party apps already offered this functionality.
Those blogging via email (where a blog can be updated by sending email to a private address) will likely find landscape mode in Mail improves their typing speed and accuracy.
The ability to cut and paste text from web pages and other applications such as the notepad is useful for those who quote other people, though it can still become tedious to do this task because, if you’re following web etiquette and attributing your sources, you first have to copy the text from Safari, go back to your blog app, email message or other Safari tab, paste that text, then return and copy the URL of the original web page to create the link.
Those creating large link lists will likely find this extremely irritating, unless an app exists that can speed up this process (if it does I haven’t seen it).
So, those relying predominantly on text are better catered for thanks to copy/paste and the landscape keyboard, but unfortunately image processing is still far from ideal.
Because iPhone 3.0 is so new, not all third party blogging applications will support direct pasting of a copied image from a web page.
The only other options for importing images into blog posts is to take a photo directly with the iPhone’s camera or add one from the photo library. It works, particularly if you’re liveblogging or using images of your current surroundings, but makes it difficult if you need to edit images first.
Video bloggers who have bought the iPhone 3G S should soon be able to upload videos to supported services, though we’ll have to wait for developers to update their apps to allow this.
Moderation and Admin
I’ve found the iPhone is most useful for those little administrative jobs that need doing, such as moderating comments, deleting spam, quick fixing typos and other non-network intensive tasks.
Nothing particularly outstanding has been added to help with this, except features that have already been mentioned such as the landscape keyboard and copy/paste functionality.
Microblogging
The iPhone is already well served by Twitter applications, and solutions exist for other services.
I’ve not yet seen any of the Twitter apps updated to allow push notification of new tweets. I expect it will happen, and this alone will make staying in touch very useful.
Podcasting
Apple’s built-in voice recorder is a bit of a letdown. It does the job but is very basic in comparison to some third party apps such as Griffin’s iTalk.
Nevertheless, if you don’t want to use something else, the built-in app will capture live audio and let you upload it to your computer for subsequent processing.
Room for improvement
Here are some additional features that could make the iPhone even better for blogging tasks:
- Multi-clipboard: The ability to store and retrieve more than one text block/image at a time would aid in quoting and source attribution amongst other tasks.
- Hardware keyboard: Now that Apple has allowed third-party hardware development, an add-on QWERTY keyboard would allow much faster entry of text. It could either plug directly into the dock or possibly work via Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. Could include a built-in stand.
- Access to file system: Adding images from the photo library in dedicated blog apps works, but it would be useful to be able to insert images directly into blog posts when using a blog platform’s web interface via Safari.
- Instant Messaging: Meebo was due to be released as a native app for the iPhone, but it doesn’t appear to have made it into the first 3.0 release. Though it is available for the iPhone, making it native would likely afford it more system privileges.
- Application switching: Even if Apple won’t allow more than one third-party app to run at once, some tasks would be so much easier if you could quickly switch between recent applications (Mail, Safari and WordPress app for example) without having to navigate in and out of the home screen.
Conclusion
The iPhone still isn’t the greatest mobile blogging platform available. It’s great for microblogging, blog admin and quick posts including live photos. Other tasks take a bit more work – good in an emergency but you probably wouldn’t want to rely on it long-term.
That said, it’s a mobile phone and pretty amazing when you consider just what you can achieve on it.
Automation: Spend time now to save time in the future
Setting up systems that automatically control certain aspects of your blog can be a great timesaver down the line, even though the initial time (and possibly monetary) investment may be difficult to swallow.
The great thing about many self-host blog platforms (WordPress and Movable Type in particular) is that they offer a great range of customisation options.
It’s possible to change a lot more than the basic layout if you know what you’re doing (or can hire/coerce someone who does).
Here are a few ideas for automating tasks so that you don’t have to spend time thinking about them and can focus on content creation:
Advertising
Ensuring that advertising slots are displayed in the correct place is simple if you have a good grasp of the design template your blog is using, but it’s also possible to use a plugin to handle the moving or rotating of adverts, or to only display them on certain types/ages of posts.
Related Posts
Many people use a related posts plugin to automatically display links to similar articles based upon keywords.
This doesn’t stop you from manually linking to related content, but it does mean you can encourage readers to click through to other entries without any real effort on your part, other than accurately and consistently tagging posts.
Special Content
Most blog platforms allow you to include additional fields (WordPress calls them “Custom Fields”). With some nifty programming (or installation of existing plugins) these can allow you a great deal of publishing flexibility.
Instead of having to hard code repetitive content into the post itself, using these custom fields allows the blog software to insert new content.
Link List Posts
It’s possible to tie up your Google Reader account to automatically publish a list of links from your new shared items. If you do this sort of thing regularly and you get a lot of links via RSS feeds it can be a great way of sharing them without additional work on your part.
Front Page Updates
Some blog templates have quite a distinct front page, often used as a showcase for the rest of the blog (I’m thinking of Brian Gardner’s Revolution themes, for example).
It can be good to include static text blocks as well as dynamically generating the latest headlines, but at first glance the only way of changing this is to edit the home.php (WordPress) template.
In fact, there are plugins (Get-a-Post for example) that allow you to specify where on the front page static text (or HTML) blocks should go, and then insert the content of a page or post.
These are just a few ideas that immediately sprang to mind. The fact is, if there’s something you are doing repetitively on your blog (apart from creating original content, that is) then there’s a good chance that task can be automated.
It may take a while to find the right plugin or to hone the design so that it does what you want, but imagine what it could do for your productivity if you were able to save even five or ten minutes per post and improve the visitor experience.
What things have you automated on your blog?
Akismetting Spam Is Good SEO
Matt Mullenweg recently published a great little article over on the official Akismet blog where he shares three reasons why eliminating spam is good SEO for your site. There are three things you definitely don’t want to encounter when running a blog and that is:
- Undermineing Your Sites SEO
- Attracting More Spammers
- Damaging Your Reputation
I wanted to also bring to light a new technique that these comment spammers are using which I discovered through Growmap.com. Apparently, spammers are taking bits and pieces of already published comments and re purposing them into their own comment. This means their content is generally on topic and makes it harder to distinguish than a random, off the wall comment. According to Growmap, Akismet flagged a few of these comments for them so it’s good to see the spam catcher on the ball but I’m willing to bet a few novice bloggers will be publishing these as legit comments. How well has Akismet worked on your blog?
Google Analytics API Now Available To Developers
Google recently announced that the Google Analytics Data Export API which was in beta is now currently available to all developers. The API provides read-only access to your analytics data. On top of that, any data which is available through the standard analytics interface is available through this API meaning you could create your own desktop application to monitor your site versus using your browser. Now that the API is available to all, it will be interesting to see various widgets, gadgets, and applications spring up which allow you to easily keep tabs on your data in not so traditional ways.
For more information check out the official analytics blog post.
All About Google Authority
Chris Garret who has been a long time contributor here to Performancing.com has published a great writeup covering just about all aspects of what it takes to gain authority on Google. In his white paper approach, Chris covers trust, influences, good behaviour, traffic, and much more as all of it relates to your authority on Google. He even includes a visual aid at the end of the article which is a Google authority mind map.
People look at Wikipedia and think they rank so highly and so often because of pagerank, or perhaps because they have a gajillion links, but there is another powerful element we can overlook if we are not careful.
Once relevance, links and keywords are taken into account, the true engines of search engine success are now believed to be “Trust” and “Authority”. But what do those phrases mean in this context, and how do you get more of the good stuff?
Use IconFinder To Locate Icons
Are you having a hard time finding cool looking icons to use on your site? If so, check out IconFinder.net. IconFinder is a search engine specifically created to look for icons within their database. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any WordPress icons but when I typed in money, I was greeted with eight different results.
IconFinder provides a number of different ways to hone your search such as the ability to control the size range from 0px to 128px, the number of icons per search result page, and the color of the background. The background color is particularly interesting because you not only get a chance to see how the icon looks on a white background, but also on a gray and finally, black background.
In the top left corner of the search results, you’ll find the image format while on the opposite side, you’ll see the meta information for that image which includes designer, license, package, and tags.
Overall, a very nice site that makes finding cool icons a very simple process. Oh, and they have a really cool logo as well!
Figuring Out Those Pesky File Extensions
Have you ever come across a file that you didn’t know how to open? There are thousands of file extensions in use today with the same amount of programs to open them. However, all of those programs are not loaded on your PC so when it comes time to open up an unknown file, how will you do it? If you’re using Windows, the operating system will ask you if you would like to browse the Web through Microsoft’s database to see if you can find a program to open up the unknown file extension. While you may find the information you need, Microsoft will not suggest free programs for you to use to open the file. This is where OpenWith.org comes into play.
OpenWith.org provides detailed information about most file extension and links to free programs that can open and create each type of file. Extensions are viewable on the site by their first letter, by search, or by category. If the extension doesn’t exist, you can easily submit the extension with the details you know to the site where the administrators will take over.
The best thing OpenWith has to offer is the links to free programs which will open the extension in question. For example, I checked out the .HED extension which is for Hi-Eddi Images. I’ve never heard of these types of images but thankfully, OpenWith has. According to them, Hi-Eddi Images can be opened with a piece of software called XnView 1.91.6. I can either visit the official website for XnView or I can download the software straight from the OpenWith website. Plus one on the convenience factor.
OpenWith.org should certainly be added to your list of resourceful bookmarks. You’ll never know when your friends will send you that awesome movie or picture in a format you’ve never heard of.
SEM Labs Icon Pack
SEM Labs has released under the Creative Commons license 52 blogging inspired icons. The icons are 48 pixels by 48 pixels in size and are in PNG format. I’m not sure what the deal is with icons but there is an increasing demand for them. I know based on experience since the icon pack posts I published on my personal blog have received the most search engine traffic.
