I just received this email question from one of my students:
Peter,
I am currently working on a website for one of my clients. She said that she took your web design class and mentioned that you use QualityHostOnline.com for your hosting and domain needs instead of GoDaddy. My question is why? Why meaning is there a reason or just a preference that you choose Quality Hosting. Please let me know.
Here is my response:
Tim,
Originally GoDaddy limited what you could install on the server. When I first hosted with them I quickly found out I couldn’t install Drupal. I still remember how arrogant the help person was telling me that the agreement did not allow a refund but that he was going to refund some of my money anyway…
The Drupal limitation has since been fixed although recently there was a snafu with a GoDaddy client using Drupal and being charged over $6,000 (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-fendelman/why-i-dont-owe-godaddy-65_b_129276.html) The only thing that helped resolve the problem was his article on Huntington and the furor it caused. All the bad press caught GoDaddy’s president’s attention and he stepped in to resolve the things and stop the bad press.
Their advertising is extremely sexist. Something I might enjoy looking at but not something I can recommend to students in class. Especially when one of my students started doing a web site for his church…
And, just recently, I tried to transfer my domain being held by GoDaddy to QualityHostOnline. It took me over two months to accomplish due to an unknown userid/password that was automatically setup without my input when I purchased a privacy option. Because my email on GoDaddy was no longer valid I had to fax, mail, and send scanned copies of my driver’s license and a specific numbered form to a branch of GoDaddy. They would also have accepted copies of my passport which makes me even more nervous. They made it EXTREMELY difficult to do the transfer. I had to send the request three different times and made numerous phone calls all to the answer of “I’m sorry, that is out of our control.”
Meanwhile, I’ve been with QualityHostOnline for almost five years now and have had excellent support, low cost, and overall good results on a consistent basis. They were very helpful and responsive during my domain name transfer. I’ve also recommended this hosting service to other instructors and many many clients and everyone is having the same positive experience.
So, there you have it.
Guess I’ll make this into a blog entry.
Peter
PS – You might want to do a web search for “GoDaddy ethics” It makes for some interesting reading.
Addendum: 09-15-09 I’ve been having a lot of downtime with QualityHostOnline.com and am migrating my servers over to BlueHost.com based on recommendations from several of my students. I can no longer recommend QualityHost as I have in the past.
I’m using ScreenFlow to create my onscreen videos. This is an amazing program that allows me to capture video and sound and edit using scrolling and panning. Mac only. What is displayed here is only the video portion of the more complete tutorials I offer as part of my online and face2face courses.
The videos shots of my whiteboard talks are taken using a very inexpensive ($150) Aiptek HD1080P pocket-size video. Chad Peterson, one of my students is working on the editing. These resulted from one of my online students asking me to record my entire class. That is very difficult, getting good sound, but I thought I’d try some simple videos that focused on specific concepts to see how enhance the learning activities for each module.
I’d be interested in your comments on how useful these would be to you as a student. Thanks!
I often talk about my son Micah in my classes because he gives me so many real-life examples that show how the concepts I present in class are put to work out in the real world.
Micah has written an interesting resume building site named GigTide using Adobe Flex. When he first published the site he received emails from several users in Italy and Greece asking him to fix the application so they could use the special characters of their language.
Did he have to re-write the entire application? Nope. All he had to do was change the character encoding to UTF-8 (Read Tim Bray’s article if you’d like to know all the gory details about character encoding.) Now GigTide.com can be used by Americans as well as by people that use a script languages found in other parts of the world.
And, its a good thing too, because when Micah checked his Google Analytic numbers the other day he discovered a nice surge in hits from Thailand. He did a little research and discovered a Thai blogger had written about GigTide and it triggered a surge in interest with the site.
That’s the example. Here’s what I teach in my course:
Keep in mind that when you put a web site up that you have the entire world as your market. Not just your town, or your state, or your country, but the potential of the whole world. (Think on how you can leverage your product/service/site to address more than the people in your own village…)
Use Google Analytics to keep track of what your site(s) are doing
Write your code and design your applications so they are accessible to people around the world
The cache (pronounced "cash") is a storage space on your hard drive that holds all the files that the browser receives from web servers. This includes html files as well as graphics, sounds clips, and movies.
In order to display things as fast as possible the browser checks the cache first and if it finds the pages you are requesting it uses the files on your hard drive instead of waiting for new ones to be downloaded from the Web.
If you are a web developer this can be trouble because the browser will keep showing you the old version and not the file with the changes you have just made.
A common trick is to hold down the CTRL key when requesting a new web page. This tells the browser to bypass the cache and to get the files once again from the source. This works with IE6, IE7, FireFox and other Mozilla-based browsers.
Using FireFox about:config settings
In FireFox you can disable the cache by using the about:config page. Type about:config in the address field of Firefox.
Do a search for browser.cache and set the line set browser.cache.disk.enable to false. Restart FireFox to apply this setting.
There are many other settings you can make to FireFox in the about:config page. Here is an excellent page that highlights some popular ones. Proceed with caution however. You can really ruin things if you mess around too much and don’t know what you are doing. Make one change at a time and test it. Also, I would recommend backing up the prefs.js file if you plan to do extensive configuration changes. On XP it is located in the C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR-USER-NAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\YOUR-CONFIG-FOLDER.default. (If everything fails just delete the prefs.js file and FireFox will create a new one with default values.)
InkScape is an open-source alternative to Adobe Illustrator. It uses SVG – Scalable Vector Graphics which is XML based. You can download it here. Tavmjong Bah is working on an InkScape book. You can view his preliminary copy on his web site.
Here’s a sample of the type of illustration that can be created using this program:
This is a perfect companion to GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) which is an open-source program similar to Adobe PhotoShop. GIMP is excellent for photo manipulation.
An Application Programming Interface is a set of functions that let you “hook” into a system without having access to the source code or inside workings of that system. There’s an API for all the modern languages like Java, PHP, Ruby On Rails, and HTML. Sites such as Google, Amazon, and eBay all have an API allowing programmers to access information from their sites. Here’s a list of the APIs Google has available for many of its services including maps, adwords, and Blogger data. This lets a savvy programmer include all types of eBay or Amazon services on their web site by using what these sites have already created.
You can also think of an API as a dictionary. Just like an English dictionary displays words and their meanings, an API lists all the functions available in the API as well as what type of information each one is expecting and what type of information each function will return. Programmers use an API as a reference in using functions correctly.
Up until now a programmer had to keep a copy of each API on their computer or keep a list of bookmarks pointing to the APIs out on Web.
gotapi.com changes all of that. All the common language APIs are now available from a single link page. (Sorry, the application APIs such as Google, Amazon, and eBay aren’t listed yet.) As a programmer this means you can find information quickly as you are writing code.
Tip: With the gotapi.com page displaying, click and drag the icon in the Address field of your browser and drop it on upper part of your Start menu button. You’ll see a solid black line showing you were it will be positioned as you drag it into the Start list.
Anytime you need to look up a function, gotAPI.com is only a click or two away.
- Special thanks to Sean Washington for reminding me about this really great programming tool.
Everyone likes free books. Here is an excellent resource being organized by Globaltext.org .
Here’s a summary from their web site:
Through what he’s dubbed, “The Global Text Project,” Rick Watson and an international team of professors aim to create a free library of 1,000 electronic textbooks covering subjects typically encountered during the first two years of college. A prototype text is already complete, and work is underway on the first book in the series.
The prototype book was created in 2004 because Watson couldn’t find a comprehensive textbook for a graduate level XML programming class he was teaching. Each student was assigned to write chapter, and Watson served as editor-in-chief. The book, “XML: Managing Data Exchange” (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/XML), turned out so well that it is still used in classes at UGA today. Each class that uses the text makes improvements on it, leaving it in better condition than they found it.
I looked through the XML text as well as the Java text and they both are an excellent resource for my class.
It’s interesting. Last semester I had my Web III (XML) class start a Wiki as part of the learning process. The idea was to do exactly what wikibooks is doing, although I didn’t know about wikibooks back then. I was disappointed when the students simply posted information that they copied from other sources on the Web in order to complete the assignment each week. I deleted the whole thing over the summer and decided not to pursue it.
Now I’m thinking of resurrecting this project. We could focus on a specific topic and all work together using a private wiki (a wiki is a web page where a group of people can all edit the pages – wikipedia is the most famous of these.) At the end of the semester we could submit the chapter to wikibooks.
Meanwhile, you don’t have to be in a third-world country to take advantage of these textbooks. Go out and find your favorite topics and bookmark them for reference.
Thanks to Tom Edwards for sending me the link about this.
If you work with files you should have a set of rules that you follow so that your file names are always consistent. This is especially true if other people will be working with your files which is very common in web work and programming.
Here’s the file naming conventions that I have developed over the years as a programmer and web person. What you do is not as important as being consistent. Using the same name convention will save you countless hours of “fixing” things and looking up to see how a filename was spelled. I recommend using these rules for filenames, folders and directories, and variable names.
always start a filename using lowercase
don’t use spaces or underscores _
use camelCaseToMakeNamesEasierToRead
don’t use plurals – for example: Use “graphic” instead of “graphics”
be consistent with extensions. .html should always be .html and not .htm one day or .default on another day.
Here’s the reasoning and experience that helped me develop this list:
Always start a filename using lowercase 80% of the web servers use Apache running on Linux and Linux is case sensitive. By starting every name with a lower case letter you remove the guesswork like “Now, was it Index.html or index.html?” On a Linux server these are two different things.
Each time you have to go look up a file name to find out you used the wrong upper/lower case means less time with your video games or bronzing on the beach.
Don’t use spaces or underscores “_” Web servers and programming languages are befuddled by spaces. They may work in Windows and Word, but most other computer programs don’t even allow them. Linux is a good example.
Why not underscores “_” you may ask. Underscores will “hide” when being displayed as an underlined word and users think they are spaces. Also, why add another character to your name if you don’t have to? And finally, how many people can touch-type the _ character. Every time you have to pause your typing to hit a special key means the longer it takes to complete your killer app. Use camelCaseToMakeNamesEasierToRead This is the solution to not using spaces or underscores. Note how easy it is to read the statement above. Its much faster to type this way. You’ll have to personally decide how you are going to handle acronyms. For example: web3RSS.html or web3Rss.html or web3rss.html
My recommendation, for readability and recognition, is to keep an acronym as all caps: web3RSS.html
Don’t use plurals
For example: use “photo” instead of “photos”
When working with a programming team we spent countless hours fixing our programs because of simple spelling “errors” like this. Then, one day someone suggested that we follow this rule and everyone’s life got so much easier.
It’s a little weird at first, but after a few times of knowing how a foldername will be and not having to go look it up makes it all feel right in the end.
Be consistent with extensions and keep them lowercase.
I recommend always using .html. Don’t use .htm one day and .html the next.
Same thing with .jpg
By following these rules on a regular, and consistent basis, you will be able to work faster and with a lot less frustration.Note: There’s a few exceptions to all of this. If you are a Java or .NET programmer than you will want to have all your Class files begin with an upper case letter. And constants are always written using ALL_CAPS with underscores to separate the words. These are both naming conventions that were around a lot longer than my little set of rules.
Explore what you are passionate about. Build a business using the power of the Web. Read these articles to find out tips and tricks on doing this successfully.
Have something to add? We are always interested in your ideas.
