Category Archives: Server-Side

Server-side scripting and configuration.

Web Hosting

Personal, Server-Side

I’m looking for a new host. My current web host for this site is not providing for my needs, so I really need to find a host that is cost-effective and has all the features I require. My current host is very limiting for the following reasons:

  • Disk Space: 30MB is not enough disk space. I have almost run out with just the Firefox Flyers and the Firefox 5 Minute Challenge taking up over 15MB already, and there’s more to come.
  • MySQL is not supported, and therefore, I cannot run my own CMS for my blog, such as MovableType or WordPress.
  • Old Apache and PHP. There are some nice features in the newer versions of Apache and PHP that I would like to utilise, but can’t because they’re still running the old versions.
  • Log Files: They do not, and will not provide any access to website logs, so I have no idea about any visitor statistics, which I would like to know. eg. Browser statistics and referral logs. I want to know if anyone actually visits my site with IE (I hope not, my target audience should know better) and who is linking to me, to know how my visitors are finding me. I know statistics can’t really be trusted, all I want is a general idea, not to perform any complicated statistical analysis.

I had a quick look around yesterday, and looked at about 20-30 hosting companies and found that the services offered varied significantly. Some were extremely overpriced, yet offered less than what I have now, and others moderately priced, yet only offered a little more than I have. By far, the best offer I found is that currently being offered by XulPlanet.

The basic plan we have been offering people is $10 a month for 400 MB disk space and 10 GB bandwidth… including php, mysql, and cpanel…

That seems quite cheap – it is only a little more than I’m paying now, which is to be expected for better services. It offers significantly more disk space, MySQL and PHP which will allow me to run my own CMS, and cPanel which will offer all the logs I wanted, plus many more features. The HTTP Headers show they’re also running Apache 1.3.29 and PHP 4.3.3 – the same as my current host – but I can live with that, the benefits offered by the newer versions aren’t all that significant for me anyway, and there’s always a chance they’ll upgrade their server one day, so it’s not a problem.

I’m not switching just yet, but will be in the near future, and that looks to be the best option. If anyone knows of any better hosts available, or has any other advice for me, let me know.

Atom Feeds

MarkUp, Server-Side

I have finally got around to setting up the atom feeds correctly for both of my blogs. I’ve gone for a while without any feeds available, which probably means I’ve lost out on quite a few subscribers. Well, for those of you, if any, who’ve been visiting the blogs regularly, I’m happy to say the feeds are now available, and set up for auto discovery. The feeds are just the Atom feeds that blogger provides. As I said, The feeds are available for Lachy’s Log and Net Twits.

I was considering setting up an RSS feed as well, but having read the disasterous RSS 2.0 spec today, and Mark Pilgrim‘s myth of RSS compatibility, I have decided that RSS has been created as a mess of proprietary extensions worse than the HTML extensions created during the browser wars. For starters, there’s not even an agreed upon expansion for the acronym. It started out as RDF Site Summary, which was later chagned to Rich Site Summary, and finally to Really Simple Syndication. That was confusing enough, and now to see that not one is really compatible with any other, I’d rather just steer clear of the whole mess if I can.

Directory Restructuring

Server-Side

For quite a while now, I’ve been thinking that the original directory structure I chose for my website didn’t quite match my needs. The only problem was, I didn’t want to break any links that already point to existing documents in those directories. The directories I wanted to move were /xhtml/, /css/, /zengarden/ and /script/. I wanted to put zengarden under CSS, and group the XHTML, CSS and Script directories under a single development directory, which I decided to call /dev/.

The solution I found was to move them as described, and use Apache’s Redirect directive from mod_alias. The rules I added to my .htaccess file took this form

Redirect permanent /xxx http://www.lachy.id.au/dev/xxx

Where xxx represents the XHTML, CSS, Script and ZenGarden directories. This directive causes Apache to respond with an HTTP 301 Moved Permanently status code, and the location for the user agent to find the actual resource. The only problem is that I needed to use the full URI, rather than a relative path for the redirection, which means that the same directives won’t work as I wanted for my testing server on my localhost, since any request for http://localhost/css/, for example, will redirect to http://www.lachy.id.au/dev/css/, rather than http://localhost/dev/css/.

So, the problem is solved, and I’ve got a much more appropriate, and hopefully permanent directory structure. This will benefit a lot for my CSS Zen Garden submission, Office 2003, which is listed in the Themes and Look-alikes section. It still uses the old URI, so if it broke, anyone wanting to see my design would be disappointed to see an unstyled document. There are also several other links on various other sites that I know about, and possibly others that I don’t, so it was very important that existing URIs didn’t break.