It always feels nice when you see a decision pay off in a positive way. For me this is especially nice as I seem to find things out the hard way most of the time.

In this case I am referring to a hosting provider I decided NOT to choose. That host is DreamHost. I had done a lot of research on DreamHost and was sure I would go with them when the time can except for chance stumble upon a blog post describing many performance and uptime problems the blogger had experienced with DreamHost. After some debating with myself I decided to look for a different host. That’s how I found HostGator which I am very pleased with thus far.

So on to the point. DreamHost announced via their offical blog that they are encouraging their customers to use GMail instead of the email provided by DreamHost with the customer’s hosting package. Why? According to DreamHost:

Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email. Everything else we offer, combined, doesn’t add up to the amount of trouble, expense, use, and effort that goes into “simple” old email.

And that’s kind of funny, because as far as I can tell, almost nobody CHOOSES a web host based on their email features.

They want to offload their customer service problems to Google and apparently nobody cares about email when choosing a host. Well, perhaps, that’s because when we choose to pay you for an advertised service we except it to just work and be rock solid. I am not going to contact your sales department and ask for email stats and uptime charts. I expect that it is the best it can possible be.

On the positive side Google probably provides a much more reliable service than DreamHost and Google does it for free. You can even use you@yourdomain.com if you use Google Apps (also free).

I am just glad I stayed clear of DreamHost. What service will they try and drop next?

As a side note I was very surprised at the tone of their blog. It is incredibly unprofessional and I would expect it was written by a nerdy high school student. Here are some quotes.

Some people might say Web Hosting is for late night orgies in the data center.

Me + Web Browser = Instant Orgy (tool tip on image of woman wearing a Firefox tank)

see you emo fags later - tom

To me this is a huge warning sign as to the way the company is run. There is no way I would ever even consider using DreamHost again.

Firstly I would like to thank Wink Chin for sending me an email to let me know the link to the demo of the Twitter API was broken. I have fixed that so you should have no trouble previewing the code in action.

I haven’t done much work on the API lately but I have noticed a buzz around the blogosphere about Twitter and it looks like a good opportunity to revive the project. I hope to be posting more about the API in the near future and will hopefully have some updates and new features for you to play with.

The latest updates for the API are here and here and you can download the demo code here.

Here is what I found interesting this week.

Entity Framework, Long term plans
I have since rewritten this slide to be more generic in “A single model cannot possibly be appropriate for all facets of your application including transactional behaviors, searching, and reporting”

Why use the Entity Framework? Yeah, why exactly?
I’ve spend the entire last 6 years of my life on something called Object-Relational Mapping, so I think I can comment on Danny’s claims a bit. Object-Relational Mapping, or O/R mapping or ‘ORM’ (for the people who aren’t aware of ORM being the acronym of Object Role Modelling) can be implemented in a lot of ways, and it is always used to solve a mismatch between two projections of an abstract entity model: the projection onto a relational schema and the projection onto an object oriented language. For more details, read my essay about this subject (don’t let the title feed you with presumptions about the contents). As this is rather abstract, let’s use an example: a very simple Order system

Google to become the hoax police?
Michael Gray has some thoughts on a quote by Matt Cutt’s and Google’s possible intent to censor what they deem as mis-leading information such as hoax stories. In my opinion, this is overstepping, in this case an understatement, their role as a search engine.

I have shared my personal troubles when working with a server that is not on a proper backup routine. I also talked about another blogger who had similar problems not too long ago. Today, however, I read a truly sad story of how things can go really wrong when you don’t take backups seriously.

It started out pleasantly enough. I was just catching up on John Chow’s trip to China. Now I don’t read John’s blog regularly but I like to scim his RSS feed for interesting headlines. Well I found one today, “Hunting Pandas At The Shanghai Zoo“. Turns out it was just a video of him and his family at the zoo but the real gold was in the link to the “true life account” of how John had a rock fight with Pandas.

That was a funny post to read. I’ll be laughing about that one for a while. What about the backup post you promised? Just hold on, I;m getting there. I promise.

I decided to check out Carl’s blog (the third guy from the Panda story). Alright, here you go. This is the point of my article. the first post I see on Carl’s blog is an explaination that the data recovery company he sent his hard drive (after a server crash) was not successful in recovering any data.

So what is the magnitude of this loss? HUGE! He says he has lost 5 years worth of data for his personal blog as well as 10 years worth of data for his Surreal-News forum. Ouch! Among other data lost was sites of friends and family. That is a tough loss to take.

What can we learn from this? Carl says it himself. “never really intended to run many important sites from my server. I really should have set up RAID regardless.” That’s how it usually goes. You don’t intend to store important data but eventually it creeps onto the server and before you know it you’ve lost important data.

I wish Carl the best of luck in the future and hope he does imlement RAID like he says. You should setup up some nightly backup (at least weekly) software onto a seperate harddrive. Doing a weekly or monthly offsite swap (take a copy off site) is always good when possible.

Here is what I found interesting this week.

The future of PHP
PHP is already popular, used in millions of domains (according to Netcraft), supported by most ISPs and used by household-name Web companies like Yahoo! The upcoming versions of PHP aim to add to this success by introducing new features that make PHP more usable in some cases and more secure in others. Are you ready for PHP V6? If you were upgrading tomorrow, would your scripts execute just fine or would you have work to do? This article focuses on the changes for PHP V6 — some of them back-ported to versions PHP V5.x — that could require some tweaks to your current scripts.

The How Lame Is Technorati Experiment
This will be kind of a rant. What’s the point of Technorati? Can anyone tell me? Does anyone even go there any longer except me? Is there a point to it? I used to get a decent amount of traffic from them on a couple of other blogs, but here at Affiliate Confession, if traffic from Technorati were considered water, I would be dead.

A new spin on the datepicker control
Just when you thought that datepickers had been played out, along comes Filament Group and puts a whole new spin on it. Working from Mark Grabanski’s jQuery UI DatePicker control, the team substantially enhanced the UI with a host of new features

Icahn’s Yahoo fight puts Microsoft in driver’s seat
Icahn wants Yahoo to reopen talks with Microsoft, saying the company’s board had acted “irrationally” when it rejected Microsoft’s $47.5 billion buyout offer. Microsoft walked away from the deal earlier this month when Yahoo rejected its final offer of $33 a share, holding out for at least $37 a share.

CBS in US$1.8B deal for online news, info website CNet Networks
CNet was an early player in the dot-com boom and survived the subsequent crash with a steady focus on technology news, reviews and entertainment. But its stock, which once traded as high as $79 during the bubble, has slumped over the last two years, leading to an investor rebellion that was gathering steam just as the CBS deal was announced.

The $11.50 per-share price CBS is paying represents a huge premium of 45 per cent over CNet’s stock price the day before and seemed likely to resolve a looming proxy battle with its biggest investor, the hedge fund Jana Partners LLC, which has pressed for action to raise CNet’s stock price. Jana declined to comment.

Well do you? SEO is such an important part of running an application or a website. If done properly it can rocket your site to success but if not done properly you can be left in a dazed heap of failure. So what is SEO?

SEO stands for Seach Engine Optimization and means setting up and marketing your website in a way that maximizes your exposure on seach engines. This involves using the proper semantic HTML markup to begin with, writing your content using specific keywords you want to be found for in searches, and getting links back to your site from other popular sites to improve your seach ranking.

This may sound simple enough but it is a huge task and requires a lot of insight into the SEO market. So what do you do?

Take Dan Durick for example. Dan focuses on car dealer SEO. That’s right the SEO market is large enough to allow for specialization. Each market requires special knowledge and insight to promote a site to it’s full potential.

It is clear from reading the articles on Dan’s blog that he knows what he is talking about when it comes to promoting a car dealership website. He demonstrates in one article how the decline in search traffic for dar dealerships is directly representative of the lagging economy. His data shows that sales are down this year and the search traffic follows a similar curve.

This skill is important to an SEO. Firstly, it will help you keep your job when you can present the hard, cold facts to a disappointed manager that wants to blame him for the decline in seach traffic. It is also important for the customer so they can understand how things work and how they can adapt to the ever changing seach market.

After my post on job search yesterday it has left few details on how to secure that job once you have found it and have a scheduled interview. In today’s post I’ll talk a bit about being prepared for that interview.

A job interview is the make or break factor in you getting a job. Sadly, you may be the right person for the job but if you can’t convey that to the interviewer then you are not going to get it. But how can you be ready for the interview. Easy. Practice.

I came across a great site that provides free employment and recruitment videos. They provide a wide range of video topics from education and careers to outsourcing and what it means to the economy. The topic that is relevant to this post is job interview videos.

Currently they have over 4500 videos on job interviews. There are some funny videos to keep things light but there is lots of great information there. They have videos of popular interview questions, how to negotiate your salary, there’s even videos of CIA job advertisements.

You will need to figure out what your weaknesses are when being interviewed. You can determine this by getting a friend to help you with a mock interview. It would be really helpful if that person was in the field you are applying for. Get your friend to prepare some industry specific questions that will likely be part of your real interview. You should also do some research to find out what common interview questions are.

Once you have pin pointed some of your weaknesses you can browse the interview videos to get tips and advice for improving those areas.

Just remember there is nothing worse than going into an interview without being prepared. You will certainly be caught off guard on some questions and that could really hurt your chances of getting the job.

I consider myself very fortunate. I didn’t have a hard time finding a good job. I was only graduated from college for a couple months when an employer came to me and offered me a job because they were referred to me by my college.

Not everyone is so fortunate and it can be hard sometimes to find a good job that makes you feel valuable. Recruitment agencies can work for you much like the reference from my college did for me. Agencies have far more resources and contacts than you do and some employers only hire through agencies.

There is a down side to agencies. They cost money and for someone searching for a job this might be a problem. Where can you turn then to get valuable information, that will give you a competitive edge, when job hunting that isn’t going to hurt your wallet?

Enter HumanOnline. HumanOnline is a recruitment directory offering services for various parts of the United States. HumanOnline publishes articles and resources related to human resources, recruitment, and job search.

For instance looking at the page for job search Arizona you see job search sites for Arizona aswell as recruitment agencies in that area. This information is broken up by city. When I looked at the listings for Phoenix it was nice to see well established resource sites listed. To be honest I was expecting a bunch of ‘fly by night’ paid listings. I was pleasantly surprised.

What’s nice about HumanOnline is that they are a human editing directory. This helps keep only relevant and high quality information in the directory unlike a lot of directories that accept anyone willing to pay $10.

So if your on the hunt for a rewarding career stop by HumanOnline. You’ve got nothing to lose expect opportunities if you don’t visit them.

Friday Roundup for May 9, 2008

Here is what I found interesting this week.

IE and Windows XP Service Pack 3
Sadly Microsoft has decided to keep shipping IE6 with SP3 for Windows XP. They missed a great opportunity to boost IE7 adoption.

3 Golden Rules For Working From Home
One of the great things about working from your own home is freedom.
Freedom to start work when you want, wear what you want and work the
hours that you want. Right? Well actually, probably not.

In reality working from home doesn’t work like that –- well not in
my experience anyway. You usually end up working normal business hours
plus a few more to boot (though you may still be in your PJs).

You’ve heard me rant about my past hosting problems. It is no secret; I hold some hostility toward GoDaddy for the bad service I received, but that is in the past. I am writing to give a brief update after 7 weeks of using HostGator.

I purchased their “Baby” shared package as my requirements don’t call for anything more at this time (of course should I get to the front page of Digg I would be screwed). It was an unbelievable deal. Unlimited websites hosted with a tonne of space and bandwidth for less than $80 for the year (with a 20% off coupon).

I took a long time before committing to HostGator. Who, really, is the best web host? Especially when you are looking for the cheaper end of the scale. This time I thing I hit the jackpot. My sites have been very fast with no downtime so far and I love CPanel. What more could you ask for. I plan on doing a more detailed review after a year.