New hosting
I know I’ve been quiet for an unusual period of time. I know, I know, I’ll get to that in my next post. This one is more practical though and needs to go out first.
Quietly, this blog (and all the other websites that I maintain) have moved from the host where they’ve lived happily for the last 6 years to something new. Bluehost was great for me back in ’06, when I was a freshman in college, keen on registering a permanent domain name and becoming more active on the web. It wasn’t too pricey (and I was able to share the use with some friends to fit it in a student’s budget) and the controls were pretty clear for someone starting out.
As the years have passed though, I’ve more and more often found the shared resources to be insufficient, occasionally causing big loading times for my websites because of the necessary throttling of shared hosting. I’ve also seen the domain registrar fees increase (when the privacy option became something you paid for separately) and I also started to have a need to run my own server processes for various other projects I’m working on. It was clear that I had outgrown the capabilities of my initial setup and needed to bite the bullet and move on.
So waving goodbye to Bluehost and being thankful for 6 years of good service with virtually no critical incidents, I moved on to using Linode for my server and Hover for my domain registration. These services were strongly recommended by people in the industry that I trust and I can echo those recommendations as both services have been stellar so far. If you’re looking for either a registrar or a VPS provider, don’t be afraid to click those links.
My Linode server is a VPS out of London, entirely managed by me, which means that if any issues our outages occur, it’s now probably my fault. But hoping that won’t happen too often, I expect you will find a more responsive website and faster loading times than ever before.
There are still a few issues to iron out (e.g. the photo gallery isn’t working yet), but all the main bits are in place so if you do find any issues, please let me know in the comments.
Ads and referral links on the website
As you may have noticed, I have decided to start placing some advertisement on my website. This is a rather big decision so I want to make sure my intentions are clear.
These ads, whether they are referral links or not will ONLY be for services or products that I have used and would highly recommend. They will all be hand-picked, I am not using any automated ad platform like AdSense and I promise to keep it that way. It goes without saying that I will do my best to minimise the impact these have on the website’s layout and to keep them as simple as possible.
I also promise that I will introduce any new ad by a post explaining what it is about (the one for Zipcar is coming right up).
The motivation behind this is simple… since I would already be blogging about good services that I have used, it makes sense for me to try and also get some manner of income out of it. Good hosting doesn’t come cheap and this I hope will help offset those costs.
Real Steel
A friend pointed out that although I say that I am a huge film buff, I don’t ever write anything about the films I see. So I decided to change that and start writing about some of these. There’s a new category named “Film Reviews” where all of these will be put in.
**
So most recently, I’ve seen Real Steel. We were trying to pick between going to see Drive and this and we decided to see this because it seemed like a more “goody-feeling” kind of film and we were in the mood for that. Now before you dismiss it as a “robots boxing action flick”, give me a minute to try and sell it (my girlfriend also liked it… so read on!)
It’s truly nice and it’s really not about robots fighting. The plot is more about the strained relationship between a 11 year old kid and his dad who never wanted him, was never there for him (up until now when he has no choice) and can’t get his own life together to begin with. It’s a bit of an old story, I’ll give you that, but it’s very nicely done and I really connected well with the main characters. Hugh Jackman did well and I loved the kid. It also stars “Freckles” from Lost (she was pretty much the only thing that kept me going through the last two weeks of my attempt to watch that show… until I just couldn’t do it anymore, cute girl or not).
Now on top of what I believe is a nice story and a good plot … you get robots boxing! And that’s just awesome. I would pick this over any of Michael Bay’s transformers any time.
So you get a funny, well-written story with some nice action and CGI. This is what I call a good a match for everyone. If you can get the chance to see it in IMAX, it’s worth it.
Bookshelf
I’ve added a new page on my website – the virtual bookshelf. It’s really just a list of books that I thought were interesting and worth reading, with a few words for each of them. For now, the list is a bit short, but as I remember more of them, I will be surely updating it.
