How To Waste 25 Developers With One Simple Task

Usually, I try to be nice to folks. I mean, you never know when you are going need a favor from somebody you once insulted, right? And there's enough negative in this world already without people adding randomly to the bad-pool. But I can't hold my tongue on this one, because what Web 2.0 needs is another online to do list.

Oh no, that's not the end of it. Clearly, none of those guys know how to build a proper to-do list application, because solutionwatch.com has a list including twenty more. And people say there is no second bubble. Is this ingenuity? Is this innovation?

The mind boggles. I mean, I can feel my whole mind boggling right now. Listen, if you are a webmaster who wants to show off your swank programming skills, do the world a favor and come up with an idea that has not been done literally hundreds of times. If you are hoping to start a web-based business, I can absolutely promise you that creating another online to-do list web site will earn you less money than a free blog at blogger.com where you make 20 posts a day randomly generated from Lorem Ipsum.

And if you are looking for a way to organize your to-do list, get yourself a hipster PDA and move on.

Learn About Postfix Email Server

Postfix is an MTA, a server for sending and receiving email. Postfix was designed to be faster, more secure, and easier to configure than the ancient and widely used Sendmail MTA. If you are planning to run your own small email server, you should definitely be looking seriously at Postfix.

Linux Journal (subscribe [with $5 Bonus]) has just posted on their web site Chapter 5 of an excellent book on Postfix, uncryptically called The Book of Postfix: State-of-the-Art Message Transport.

The article itself is an overview of the Postfix architecture, which is made up of many separate programs all operating in concert to get email delivered when and where it belongs. The article may be a bit technical, especially taken outside the context of the book, but it is certainly a representative sample of the expertise that went into the book. If Chapter 5 fails to convince, you can also read Chapter 25 from the book's official web site. Recommended if you are looking to run your own email server.

For those can't eat just one, you may also want to check out Postfix: The Definitive Guide from O'Reilly. O'Reilly's definitive guides never fail to impress, and although this one is a few years old, it is still packed with valuable knowledge that remains valid.

Of course, after reading what's involved, you may decide to give up the dream of running your own email server. Often it's easier to pay someone else to worry about spam and security issues. But for the control freak, there is no substitute for root.

Root Access to Dedicated Server: $20

Maybe I'm a bit of a control freak, but I don't like shared web hosting. Yes, it is cheap, and if you are really scraping on your budget then it's wise to opt for the tiny bill. In fact there are plenty of places out there on the Web that will host your files for free. You probably get some web space with your Internet access account, and that's a great pace to start if you really want to stay cash-flow neutral or positive. You could start there and only move up when you have enough revenue from your site to pay for your own domain name and better hosting.

For me, though, it isn't a good fit. I run about 9 different domains, including web and email. I like being able to experiment with new server technologies. In short, I want root. Now, there are plenty of places out there that will lease you dedicated hardware, but usually for a pretty steep price. If you have $100 a month to spend, you probably can find what you want at The Planet. I have worked with them before and always got good support. But my sites were not making $100 a month in revenue, and I don't like being cash flow negative.

If you have broadband and your provider allows it, you might be able to build a machine yourself and host it at home. If you have an old PC lying around, you can install Linux on that old codger and put it back to work. I had trouble with this solution, though, because my provider was not quite as reliable as I wanted, and seemed to randomly change firewall rules to block my traffic. (Plus, that old box could flame out at any moment!)

The solution to the problem is virtualization. The technology behind it is pretty high tech. I don't fully understand it myself. But what it basically means is that your hosting provider builds a big server farm, and then subdivides it into virtual machines, which he leases out to you. This is a sort of hybrid approach. Although you do not get truly dedicated hardware, you do get a "server instance" of your own, to which you and only you have full access. Other virtual servers on the same hardware are kept completely separate, and you won't even know they exist. Because virtualization allows the hardware resources to be divided up into smaller pieces, you only have to pay for part of the hardware.

There are a few places where you can get a virtual server. I think the two best choices are Linode and OpenHosting. OpenHosting uses what they call utility pricing, billing you only for what resources you use, and expanding resources dynamically as your server demands them. Linode, on the other hand, dedicates resources to your use, and limits your access to those resources for which you have paid. Linode allows you to install any number of different Linux distributions on your virtual server, where OpenHosting gives you Fedora Core 4.

I have not used OpenHosting, but I have used Linode and I can tell you that the tools and service that they provide are good quality. I heartily recommend Linode to anyone looking for this kind of service. (If anyone out there has a review of OpenHosting or another virtual server provider, please post a comment.) Both services have virtual servers starting at $20 a month.

All the providers mentioned in this article rent month-to-month, no long term contract required. I'm not getting paid for these links, I just like the companies and wanted to spread the word. I hope it helps you with your own hosting needs.

The Webmaster is dead - Long live the webmaster!

The Webmaster is dead - Long live the webmaster!

For twenty years, my perspective on information technology has been one of individual empowerment. I have always thought of computers and the Internet (once I discovered it) as the lever Archimedes was asking for, the one long enough to move the world. Likewise, I have always been interested in "publishing". At one time I thought I might become a writer. I may yet one day, but it may have to wait until my old age, should I reach it alive. Then again, if a writer is one who writes, then I am a writer already. I tried my hand at running my own personal publishing business, and learned the important lesson that I am not a salesman. Failure is good for the soul.

I made my first web site in 1997. This means I was not one of those edgy, ahead of his time kind of guys. Never really was ahead of my time, just trying to keep up. But I loved the web from the beginning, because I felt it gave me a voice. In 1997 I was an avid movie-goer, and I was a bit miffed because the 1996 Oscar nominations made no sense to me. I knew I had seen tons of movies that I had liked that year, and none of them had been nominated for anything. So I resolved that in 1997 I would rate and review every movie I saw, tracking them all through the end of the year, so that next year, I would know exactly which movies deserved to get awards and which did not. Amazingly, I reviewed 75 theatrical release movies that year, not counting theatrical re-releases of older films (Das Boot, Bridge on the River Kwai, Star Wars). Did I say "avid"? Perhaps "obsessive" would be more accurate.

Because I had fallen in love with the web, I decided to post all my reviews on a web site. I didn't have a domain name then, I just posted the page to the space provided with my AOL account. I taught myself to code HTML with the help of a thin book and a web browser. I got a little thrill when I received an email from Hollywood movie director Michael Caton Jones, who complimented me on my insightful (though brief) review of his film, The Jackal. That was when I knew that the web was cool!

In those days there was a job title known as "Webmaster". The webmaster was the guy (or gal) who ran the web site. Usually it was some geeky college kid. The webmaster did everything for the web site. He managed the server, administered the web server software, wrote the content, coded the pages "by hand" in emacs (or vi if he was less dexterous or more masochistic), and wrote CGI scripts in Perl (or, God bless him, in C).

As the web commercialized and the bubble inflated, the job of webmaster fractured and divided. A commercial web site needed a system administrator, a graphic designer, a copywriter, a programmer, a usability expert; basically, the webmaster was dead, replaced by a whole corporate department.

Now, I'm okay with the web being commercialized. Hey, I like money myself, I'm not going to begrudge anyone else trying to make their own. Especially if it means I can get my books and DVDs delivered to me at a discount. But something got lost here. I liked the idea of the webmaster, the one man band, the person who is writer, programmer, designer, and system administrator, all at the same time.

Back on technology and the empowerment of the individual, the beauty of our swank new computers and our shiny Internet is that, yes, you can do it all. Using the technology and our own knowledge as leverage we can move the world. Each of us can be a webmaster, if we are crazy enough to want to be. That's what I'm doing, and that's what I'll try to help others do by publishing as much as I can of my knowledge and experiences here on Control-Escape. Long live the webmaster in all of us!