Well, that was quite a rough ride.

For several years I’ve been with HostingZoom and was fairly happy. At this point however, I heartily recommend that you stay away from them. They have obviously changed management, or something. Let me walk you through it briefly.

I’ve been noticing degraded performance on the server for several weeks. At some point I realized that the problem was not going to be cleared up on it’s own. In cPanel I can see server load and so I started going to cPanel and looking at server load any time I felt that server performance was worse than it should be. Server load was very high during these times. And it was becoming more often the case than not that my sites were very sluggish.

I finally opened a support ticket on the January 7 asking why server load was so high, pointing out how slowly my sites were running, and asking politely if they could do something about it. I got a reply from Support Level 1 saying they were escalating to Level 2 as they could not resolve my situation. Same with Level 2, they escalated me to Level 3. Finally, after many hours Level 3 support replied back that the server was under some load but there was not a lot they could do about it as there were no abuses to suspend from any of the accounts, and that they were closely monitoring the situation (for all the good that does).

By January 11 the server load was constantly high, and by high I mean really high. Website performance was really bad, often taking 80 to 90 seconds before a site would even start loading. I posted to the support ticket again asking about the situation. Response? They wanted a URL to the site that was slow so they could assist me better. They do not see any such high resource usage on the server.

Well, now I’m annoyed, how is it possible that I know more about what’s happening to the server than the server admins? I responded with URLs to 4 of the sites hosted on the account. They replied that they are closely monitoring the situation. And if I felt the server was having repeated load issues they could migrate me to one of their other servers.

Thorough the next day, I documented the high server load with screenshots of the high load situation in cPanel and posted it to my support ticket. Finally, FINALLY, tech support acknowledges a problem. They report to me that they have checked into the issue and have found 2 bad drives in the RAID which was causing the server performance issues. Not particularly reassuring, but I am at least glad they have found an issue to fix.

And that was the last I saw of my sites for 48 hours ¹. This is where a good chunk of my support ticket turns into a back and forth. My requesting information, demanding to know “why my sites are down for this long?“ “why can’t I access cPanel” “why can’t I access my databases?” “why does SSH keep closing the connection on me” etc. The reply was always, “kindly hold on while the RAID rebuilds” etc.

After 48 hours, I realized that HostingZoom was no longer the host for me. I got a couple of recommendations from people I trust, but ultimately decided to go with BlueHost. The recommendation came from someone I trusted and the prices seemed sane. I was able to do some FTP downloading from the HostingZoom server as long as I babysat the download, sometimes the server would close the connection, or simply fail to respond or whatever. I got to a place where all I was waiting on were my databases because I couldn’t access cPanel, phpMyAdmin, or SSH.

Finally after several rounds with tech support, they gave me a SQL dump of all my databases last night at about 11:45. I stayed up for a couple hours uploading databases, making the final tweaks, and testing the sites on the new server. Then I set the name servers to the new host and went to bed.

So here we are on the new host. My decision was validated when, this morning, HostingZoom informed me that the server was completely back up to speed, and the couple of sites I still haven’t been able to transfer were not loading. A quick look at the server overview on the HZ client dashboard revealed the the “http service” was down. Unbelievable.

Here’s to hoping this new host will work out better.

I know this doesn’t look anything like the site design preview I posted some time back. But I decided to go in a different direction. I like this design a lot, it’s simpler and cleaner than the previous design.

I know I need to update my Colophon page. It’s actually the same page as the “about” page was on the previous design. I’ll get around to it hopefully this week.

Also, I’ve disabled comments and have not even included the code in the new design. Why is that? First, the simple fact is, hardly anyone ever comments here. I’m just not that important. I don’t have that many readers. Getting all the coding, margins, input forms, layout, and everything else set up for comments when I redesign takes almost as long as implementing the rest of the design. It just isn’t worth it to me.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I’ve come a long way in my thinking on this. I used to think comments were essential to a blog or online publication. And I loved to think people were engaged enough to comment on my posts. It was sort of self serving. I’ve come to realize that traditional commenting systems represent everything that is wrong with the web. In fact, I don’t even bother to read comments on any of the sites I visit anymore that actually still use comments. The comments are full of ignorant trolls who want nothing more than to slander the author, or bash the other commenters. I’m not saying that’s true of most people who would comment here, but a while back (probably a couple years ago), I did have to do some comment moderation.

The nature of blog commenting lends itself to unconsidered responses. The commenter can (and often does) post anonymously, meaning there’s little repercussion for them when they are rude and inconsiderate. Many of the best publications I read now do not have comments as part of their site. They either disabled them, or in some cases realized when they were launching their site it was a waste of time and never used them.

I have a comment link up there in the menu. It will open an email composer window for you. If you would like to send me a comment, I would love to hear from you. This method of commenting will cause most people (I think) to at least a little more carefully consider their response. If I like what you say, and you give me permission, I may even post it on my blog. If you really feel strongly about something I say or do here, and you would like to respond publicly, then I encourage you to start your own site and publish something.

So, that’s my thinking in not doing comments here. You may have noticed if you follow my stuff, that I did not do commenting on Apple User Pro.

I hope you all enjoy the new design. I like it, and my wife likes it. Now maybe I’ll post pictures more often.

So perhaps it is a bit vain of me, and maybe no one will even notice or care since I don’t post on here very often. I really don’t know that anyone is paying attention to my sporadically updated site…

But I have been working on a site redesign in my “spare” time. This redesign will simplify the design (one of my design tendencies lately) and will unify all three of my current sites that I operate. I have finished the Photoshop template and am in the midst of turning that into HTML and CSS. From there it will be parsed into Expression Engine templates.

Unfortunately it will be a while before the design is actually implemented because I’m busy working on paying projects at the moment. Speaking of which, I must now go and do just that. Below is a full screenshot of the new design.

(And I do intend to start posting more often)

(click the picture to embiggen)

Announcing the mobile version of TJDraper.com for iPhone and iPod Touch (as pictured on the right!).

Now Live!

I was very careful to offer the full access and functionality while still formatting it for the small screen real-estate of the iPhone. I can’t stand sites that offer limited functionality on the iPhone version. Usually I'd rather just have the full site when that happens. So I think I have avoided that on this mobile version of the site.

And the nice thing is, you don’t have to visit a special URL. All the URLs are the same. I’m detecting the browser type with PHP. If the browser loading the page identifies itself with “iPhone” or “iPod” in the string, the page is served up in mobile format. If the browser does not identify itself as one of those two, the normal site loads. This is great because it prevents confusion and preserves permalinks etc.

To you Android users, I'm sorry! I thought the mobile version would work on Android, but I had a friend load it up on his Android phone and said it didn’t work right at all. So for now I'm serving the regular desktop version of the site to you Android users. Unfortunately I simply can't afford to get an Android device just for testing websites so I can’t develop an Android version at this time.

The rest of this post may get a bit geeky so if you do not have an inner geek, please feel free to ignore the rest. You have been warned.

So I'm kinda excited seeing as how I really am not any good at PHP programing and despise it in general (don't get me wrong, I think PHP is a good thing, I'm just more of an HTML/CSS person). The code was actually fairly simple to implement. And believe it or not, I didn’t actually even find this exact code, I found the principle and modified it to fit my needs. So here's what it looks like:

<?php

$iphone = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"iPhone");
$ipod = strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'],"iPod");
if ($iphone||$ipod == true)  { echo 'Mobile Code Goes Here'; }

else { echo 'Normal Code Goes Here'; }
?>

It's actually fairly straight forward. The first two lines find out if the browser is identifying itself as iPhone or iPod, the second line says, if either one of those is true ( the double vertical bar means “or”) then use the code in the “echo” section.

And of course “else” delivers the desktop version of the site. I must admit it took me about a week of evenings to get it just right, but I got it none the less. Now I have a few other sites I'd like to implement this on!

First, God gave us Allen:

Then God gave us Natasha:

And now we are excited to say that God has chosen to bless us with number 3! We expect this new bundle of joy to make an appearance around the first of next year!

Yeah, this is going to be a lame post just to say that I’ve updated some stuff about the site and therefore have now “almost” finished the clean up from the changeover to the 3.0 design.

Here’s the changes:

• Added my 4 latest tweets from Twitter to the sidebar.


• Updated the about page with current information. Including some subtle changes to some of the text to make the theology section more clear.

Yes, I know I still need to actually do the portfolio page. I’ll get to it… eventually…

Welcome to the 3.0 design of TJDraper.com! You will find things have been cleaned up in general. And with the two pillar side bars instead of just one, there is less scrolling to see everything in the sidebars. The Sidebar on the left is for blog utility related items like Recent Posts, Categories, Monthly Archives etc. The sidebar on the left is for stuff I want to put there, like site info, blog roll etc.

Also, for those who care, the core coding will validate, and all CSS validates with the W3C validator. You will run into some archive pages that won’t validate simply because a picture I posted a while back didn’t have the alt= attribute assigned to the img tag.

This is also my first website that will not work in IE 6. But that’s okay because it’s very hard to write code that works in modern browsers and validates, as well as works in IE6. So if any of my readers are still using IE6 I urge you to upgrade, preferably crossgrade even to Safari.

So not only have my ninja skills improved for writing code that validates, but my speed has also improved. I did this re-design in 6 hours. Granted I based the graphic design off the previous look so I didn’t sit around too much racking my brain for color schemes and stuff, and I did recycle (copy and paste) some of the Expression Engine specific code that makes the blog work. But still, it only took me 6 hours.

Me Happy!

Wait, I have a blog?!? Say it ain’t so! If I had a blog I would keep it up to date. I would certainly NEVER allow two months to go by without a single post on said blog…

Okay, okay, so I’ve been a bit busy. But I will try to find some time to post a little more often.

I’ve downloaded a cool new iPhone app called iBlogger so I can post easily from my phone.

This is a test to make sure it works. If you are reading this then it does.

I’m going to be making use of the Mobile Me Gallery (formerly Dotmac Gallery) so that anyone who desires to can see more pictures that I have time to post on the blog.

Mobile Me makes it drag and drop easy to publish the pics to my gallery from iPhoto. And you can subscribe to photo updates via RSS, or if you have a Mac, directly in iPhoto.

The URL to the gallery will reside in the sidebar, or you can get to it HERE.