Gaffney3.com

CSS naked day has arrive and as a reminder, Gaffney3.com has stripped itself naked of its CSS for the common goal of promoting web standards. Gaffney.com graciously using a CSS created by the prolific Lokesh Dhakar, but even without, the site structure and layout is still functional and appropriate for a myriad of devices, browsers and platforms because of its usage of XHTML.

As a note, I will be taking some time today to delving into the Zemanta plugin to determine if I can aid them in making their plugin produce validate XHTML, because they are currently breaking my validation.  They did release an update and I’m anxious to read its ChangeLog.

Google has officially launched their Google App Engine for full-stack, automatically scalable, hosted web application platform as of 9pm PST last night. The architecture offered consists of Python application servers, BigTable database access, and GFS distributed data file servers.

Obviously, this service is intended to go toe-to-toe with the Amazon suite of web services; more specifically S3 for data storage, EC2 for virtual servers, and their SimpleDB for database access.

Robert Scoble and Mike Arrington were at the event last night. Scoble posted several videos from the event. Arrington, as always, expatiates on the functionality, usage and monitoring of the service. Google also posted their official video from their announcement as well as a demonstration video.

From Google:

Run your web applications on Google’s infrastructure.
Google App Engine enables you to build web applications on the same scalable systems that power Google applications.

• No assembly required.
  Google App Engine provides a fully-integrated application environment.
• It’s easy to scale.
  Google App Engine makes it easy to build scalable applications that grow from one user to millions of users without infrastructure headaches.
• It’s free to get started.
  Every Google App Engine application can use up to 500MB of persistent storage and enough bandwidth and CPU for 5 million monthly page views.

The real question for me is whether this will truly be for business and enterprise level applications or for the small, supplemental apps developed on a tight deadline.

Looking to unveil its new design early next week, the new BBC News website will include wider pages, bigger images and a pan-BBC masthead according to editor Steve Herrmann. This is an exciting relaunch that I’ve been awaiting since the beta release of the new BBC homepage was announced which was certainly more than simply a lick of paint.

The most exciting change for this fanatical LINUX user is the use of of Flash embedded video rather than the Real or Windows Media format pop-up windows. This has already been rolled out with success (example). As the industry shifts its metric’s standard from pageview to time-on-site, changes like this will yield tremendous dividends.

Early signs suggest that on those stories where we’ve embedded the video in a story, as opposed to providing the link to a pop-up player as we’ve done up to now, the video gets about ten times more usage than before. So it looks like it’s working well so far. (Steve Herrmann)

To move away from the five-year-old, oppressively blue design is an absolute no-brainer. This move to a cleaner, more open layout from the beta release has proven to be more easily readable, and it appears that the BBC truly is looking and listening to its readers to lead the way to its new iteration.

Sorry for the errors accessing posts today.

During the migration process from Dreamhost to Slicehost, I neglected to set AllowOverides to All to allow for massaging of the URL structure via .htaccess.

It’s been nearly a year since migrating the domains I host to Dreamhost, and unfortunately I believe that DH has simply been unable to keep up with their rate of growth in 2007.

Source: WikipediaThe server that I share with others at Dreamhost orginally had a consistent load average under 5, and although I believe that to be too high considering the specs of the box, now averages above 12 with sharply erratic spikes over 100. Customer support has been responsive and diligent in rooting out others processes that have spun out of control, but the total users per box is simply too high. Performance of my sites is unacceptable.

Obviously the sites I manage aren’t deserving of the cost or resources associated with a dedicated server, so at the recommendation of a friend, I’ve started the transition to Slicehost who enters the market with VPS slices using Xen virtualization software to reserve memory and CPU slots. I’ve opted for the 256slice which boasts:

• 256MB
• 10GB
• 100GB
• $20 sign up

With Slicehost there are no contracts or setup fees. You are free to upgrade, downgrade, add a slice or remove a slice at your convenience. So, for 200, we’ll roll the dice again to determine whether we’ve found another temporary residence or a permanent home.