No joke, this is an entirely new site, new installation of ExpressionEngine, new design, new everything. I did import all the old entries of course, dating all the way back to just a couple months before I married my beautiful wife. It feels so good to have a clean system, untainted from all my messing around and not knowing what I was doing with ExpressionEngine over the years.
<h2>Merge</h2>
The first thing to note is that I have merged by personal blog that has always resided on this website, with my tech blog from <a href="http://buzzingpixel.com">BuzzingPixel.com</a>. The reason for this is having a movie blog, a tech blog, and a personal blog felt a bit disjointed. I wanted to consolidate and try to refresh my personal "brand" so to speak. So, all non-movie related items that I want to write about go here. That means you're going to get all kinds of stuff on this blog and if you look back through the entries, you'll find all the old entries from BuzzingPixel as well as the old entries from my personal blog. No more distinction.
<h2>Design</h2>
I think it's important for me, as a <a href="http://www.caddis.co/team/tj-draper">professional web developer</a> to have a slick, good looking website. When I rolled out design iteration four (the previous design) of this site a few years ago, I received a fair number of compliments. But since that time, mobile devices have become ubiquitous, retina screens have become more prolific — I got a retina MacBook Pro and boy did that old, non-retina design look hideous — and the design in general had become quite dated. I wanted a new design that was super clean, lent itself more to reading, was retina and mobile friendly, and in general would make me proud of my own website. In addition, there was not much of a focus on the site for telling the world about me or my family. For the redesign, I wanted to address all those issues.
So, for starters, go ahead and grab the edge of your browser (if you’re reading this on a Mac or PC), and squeeze that window down small. You'll see that the site responds to the browser size (made possible by <a href="http://weepower.com/">Wee</a>!). If you're already reading this on a mobile device, then you'll see that the site looks great on your device. And I paired down the design to a few essential elements. It's clean, it's sharp (to me at least), and I like it.
<h2>Frequency</h2>
I really doubt this means that I'll post much more often — most of my free time is consumed by <a href="http://moviebyte.com/">MovieByte</a>. But I'm going to try to write something here at least once every couple of weeks (go ahead and mark down my failure prediction).
Well, that's pretty much it. It's new, it's shiny, and I like it. I worked hard on it with late nights and weekends and if you think it looks cool, feel free to let me know. If you don't like it, well, remember how hard I worked on it and keep your opinions to yourself! (Kidding... kind of).

I Burned Down the Old Site, Here's The New One


Just a little house keeping
I know I haven't been writing much, I've been crazy busy. I want to get around to writing about the Google Reader shut down, but I just haven't had the time.
No, this is just a note somewhat related to Google and RSS. I was using Google's FeedBurner for the site's feed. This was to keep track of the subscribers. But Google has become hostile to RSS, shutting down the user facing side of their RSS world, and they've been pretty negligent with FeedBurner as well. I don't trust them with my feeds anymore. With that in mind I'm trial running a different feed service as an alternative to Google Reader that I have finally found. I wanted to trial it here before I switched <a href="http://moviebyte.com">MovieByte's</a> feeds over to it.
Everything should auto update as I have always used a 302 redirect from my feed's actual URL. And even if you have the FeedBurner URL in your RSS reader, you should still be directed to the new feed since FeedBurner is set to send a permenant redirect.
In any event, your feed readers should be set to check the URL: <a href="http://buzzingpixel.com/feeds/index">http://buzzingpixel.com/feeds/index</a> and that will get you to the right feed.
The feed service I'm going with, the only solution I've found as a viable alternative to FeedBurner, and as far as I can tell is actually better, more simple, more focused, and gives me exactly what I want, is <a href="http://uri.lv/">URI.lv</a>. Check 'em out if you are looking for an alternative to FeedBurner as well.

New RSS Feed

Yep, I'm still here. I've been focusing a lot of my energy on <a href="http://moviebyte.com">MovieByte</a>. And when I'm not doing that, I'm trying to actually, you know, make money. But I really want to make something of this site so with the new year I'm going to try to start posting again. I will try to post at least a couple of Linked List items on weekdays, though given everything going on I may miss a day here and there.
It's a new year with new opportunities and I'm excited for what's ahead! And who knows what Apple is going to do this year, it could be fun to talk about!
You will notice in the sidebar I have updated the podcasts. That's all the podcasts I am personally in, I recommend you listen and subscribe (of course).

He's Alive


Welcome to phase one of a major re-branding effort. Goodbye Apple User Pro, hello BuzzingPixel. I never really cared for the name Apple User Pro, but I was uninspired for a name at the time. Then, a few weeks ago, BuzzingPixel came to me and I loved it. I asked a friend or two what they thought and they liked it. I proceeded with a logo design, which people I have asked have mostly loved. And I like it so there it is up there.
Re-branding will hopefully not be a major turn off to anyone since I don’t really have a lot of people following me (yet).
Phase two will be the rebranding of my business, Two Edge Media, to BuzzingPixel Creative. That should bring a little more unity to my online presence.
There are also some grand plans in the works for podcasting but that’s not quite ready to go yet. In the mean time, I hope you like the new site and new design.

Rebrand

I have been annoyingly busy, well I guess it’s not actually annoying since I need work to make a living and feed my family. But unfortunately the hours I’ve been putting in have meant that I do not have time to post here the way I would like to.
I hope to resume a regular posting schedule soon.

Busy Busy Busy

Well, that was quite a rough ride.
For several years I’ve been with <a href="https://www.hostingzoom.com/">HostingZoom</a> 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 <a href="#fn:webhost1">1</a>. 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 <a href="http://www.bluehost.com/">BlueHost</a>. 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.
<hr>
<ol>
<li>The sites would occasionally load, but mostly they were throwing error 500 messages. <a href="#fnref:webhost1">↩</a></li>
</ol>

New Web Host

I know this doesn’t look anything like the <a href="/blog/2011/06/04/sneak-peak-site-redesign">site design preview I posted some time back</a>. 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 <a href="http://appleuserpro.com">Apple User Pro</a>.
I hope you all enjoy the new design. I like it, and my wife likes it. Now maybe I’ll post pictures more often.

Site Redesign

Goodbye Steve

I’ve been really, really busy trying to make ends meet, winning the bread, doing important things… all that stuff. Which is why I have not been posting on this blog I was once so eager to start.
So I decided a couple of days ago, if I cannot find time to post during the week I’ll at least post on Saturdays. I figured I would save a few RSS feeds that I wanted to blog about during the week but didn’t have time to, and blog about them on Saturday evening after I’ve finished my day’s work…
Well wouldn’t you know that today of all days, my DSL decides to go down. I called tech support and was after asking me a couple questions about the specific problems they put me on hold for 15 minutes (no joke, I’m not exaggerating). Finally someone comes back on the line and tells me that they cannot see my modem online, it is therefore not making a connection to their system (tell me something I don’t know!). They will be glad to send out a technician on Monday. MONDAY?!? I have work to do today, I’m paying for internet today. Why Monday? Well that’s the soonest anyone can get out here to diagnose and repair the problem.
So my only means of accessing the internet is via my iPhone, which I have steadfastly refused to pay an extra $20.00 a month for tethering on, so no internet to my computer. Additionally, AT&#x26;T still has not quite gotten their 3G out this far, so EDGE (2G) only.
It’s slow.
Really slow.
How slow? you ask.
Ping: 351 ms
Download: 48 kbps
Upload: 61 kbps
So yeah, slow.
But, not to be deterred from my plan to post on Saturday evening, I am typing this on my iPhone with a Bluetooth keyboard!

Making up my mind (or AT&T fail)

Sorry for the downtime last night and the weirdness with the RSS feed. I performed some upgrades to Expression Engine but didn’t realize my Multiple Site Manager was not functioning properly after the upgrade. This caused AppleUserPro to go down and the RSS feed to pull in posts from my other site TJDraper.com.
I have now corrected the issues.

Site down time, RSS feed weirdness.

<img src="/images/uploads/20110604-SiteDesignSneakPeak-curl.png" alt="preview-curl">
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)
<a href="/images/uploads/20110604-SiteDesignSneakPeak-sitefull.png"><img src="/images/uploads/20110604-SiteDesignSneakPeak-sitesmall.png" alt="sitepreview"></a>
(click the picture to embiggen)

Posts tagged “Blog News” from the blog