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Stephen Pickering

Category: Tech

  • An Easy Step to Increase Your Blog’s Authenticity

    Don’t you like information that’s simple, effective and that you can put to use right away? I thought so. Me too.

    Here’s one: Put your contact information clearly on the front page of your blog.

    Notice how Guy Kawasaki notes that most bloggers don’t! I said, “What?” And then I realized, although I have a “Contact” page, mine wasn’t either. But now it is.

    Listen to Louis Gray talk about here in this video. It’s about a minute in.

  • Making Sense of Rackspace Cloud Sites

    Since I’m offering Managed Cloud Hosting on the Rackspace Cloud platform (See Details Here), I thought I’d share this article explaining the benefits of putting your site or blog on it. This article is a reprint from this blog, WebhostingUnleashed.com

    Making Sense of Rackspace Cloud Sites

    by Cindy Waxer |

    Giving today’s leading cloud-computing vendors a good run for their money is Mosso, the cloud-computing division of hosting provider Rackspace US Inc. Rackspace is betting on Mosso’s managed-services model to provide the edge it needs to win new customers and beat competitors.

    The Nuts and Bolts of the Rackspace Cloud

    Here’s how Mosso works: Applications are loaded on Mosso’s Hosting Cloud platform and automatically inherit clustered processing, load-balancing and redundant storage. The moment an application is uploaded, it’s set to scale across an entire fleet of computers. There are no devices to think about or servers to configure. Rather than install an OS (operating system), a company simply selects one. Nor is there any need for administering the underlying systems. The result is a unique combination of cloud-computing scalability and the simplicity of a shared hosting environment.

    Important Features

    A few features separate Mosso from the rest of the cloud-computing pack:

    • By keeping its hosting platform standardized with pre-configured servers and software options, Mosso can easily monitor and scale the services its customers require.

    • Unlike Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-computing service, which does not support Microsoft Windows, Mosso supports Windows and Linux, PHP, Ruby on Rails, .Net, Perl, Python, MySQL and SQL Server. The Mosso system implements these on demand.

    • There’s no need for a company to worry about scaling up its infrastructure as traffic grows. Instead, Mosso saves site developers the headache by automatically configuring and provisioning each layer of the technology stack in order to maximize performance so that Web applications automatically scale as traffic surges.

    • The Mosso Hosting Cloud includes live 24/7 phone support and live chat — a far cry from the community-based support offered by Amazon’s EC2 cloud-computing platform.

    • The Hosting Cloud is competitively priced at $100 per month. This includes online software to create sites, databases and email accounts; 50GB of SAN storage space; 500GB of monthly bandwidth; and 10,000 compute cycles to measure how much processing time your applications require on the Mosso cloud.

    Stiff Competition

    Originality aside, Mosso still faces some stiff competition. Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) solution provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It offers companies complete control of their computing resources while running applications on Amazon’s computing environment. Amazon EC2 reduces the time required to obtain and boot new server instances to minutes, allowing businesses to quickly scale capacity as computing requirements change.

    Late last year, in Shanghai, IBM Corp. unveiled plans for Blue Cloud, a series of cloud-computing services that will enable computing across a large number of machines to deliver high-speed data analysis. Blue Cloud will be based on open-standards and open-source software supported by IBM software, systems technology and services.

    Yahoo! Inc. recently announced plans to allow researchers at Carnegie Mellon University to modify and evaluate systems software running on a 4,000-processor supercomputer provided by Yahoo. It’s part of the company’s new open-source program aimed at advancing the research and development of systems software for distributed computing.

    And finally, Google has promised to make hundreds of processors in its datacenters available to schools including the University of Washington, Stanford University and MIT to help students get a handle on the underlying hardware and software technologies involved in cloud computing.

    Credit: WebhostingUnleashed, Cindy Waxer

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  • I’m Reselling Rackspace Cloud Sites

    paypalsubMini Plan – $4.99/mo

    • 1 GB Disk Space
    • 10 GB Data Transfer Per Month
    • 10 POP accounts
    • 200 Compute Cycles Per Month*
    • Up to 2 Domains per Account.
    • Additional Bandwidth: As much as you need for 50¢ per GB
    • Additional Storage: As much as you need for $1.00 per GB
    • Additional Compute Cycles: As many as you need for 2¢ per compute cycle (See below to learn about Compute Cycles)
    • Maximum of 2 Domains. (Within the scope of the plan.)

    paypalsubBasic Plan – $9.99/Mo

    • 2.5 GB Disk Space
    • 25 GB Data Transfer Per Month
    • 25 POP accounts
    • 500 Compute Cycles Per Month*
    • Up to 5 Domains per Account.
    • Additional Bandwidth: As much as you need for 50¢ per GB
    • Additional Storage: As much as you need for $1.00per GB
    • Additional Compute Cycles: As many as you need for 2¢ per compute cycle (See below to learn about Compute Cycles)
    • Unlimited Domains (Within the scope of the plan. Charges for overages would accrue for the account as a whole.)

    paypalsubAdvanced Plan – $19.99/Mo

    • 5 GB Disk Storage
    • 50 GB Data Transfer Per Month
    • 50 POP Accounts
    • 1000 Compute Cycles Per Month*
    • Unlimited Domains Per Account.
    • Additional Bandwidth: As much as you need for 50¢ per GB
    • Additional Storage: As much as you need for $1.00 per GB
    • Additional Compute Cycles: As many as you need for 2¢ per compute cycle (See below to learn about Compute Cycles)
    • Unlimited Domains (Within the scope of the plan. Charges for overages would accrue for the account as a whole.)

    *Compute Cycles: 1 compute cycle equals about 1100 static html hits and about 200 database driven hits to your site.

    Take me to the sign up page!


    +1(501)291-1375    [email protected]

    UPLOAD YOUR SITE TO THE CLOUD
    You can create a new Rackspace Cloud powered site in less than five minutes. Load balancing, clustering, and redundant storage are all inherited by your application automatically, without any effort.

    SCALING HAPPENS AUTOMATICALLY
    Right from the second you upload your websites to Rackspace Cloud Sites™, your sites are hosted on advanced clustered cloud computing technology designed for high-performance. When your site outgrows what’s included, you pay inexpensive scale pricing for exactly what you use on the cloud and nothing more.

    You’d be getting a slot on the full $149 Rackspace Cloud Site offering. This is all certified by Rackspace itself. They make it easy for owners of the full $149 Cloud Site to resell smaller portions of it. The customer is an official customer and enjoys a secure username and password to the control panel to configure his or her site/database. One can have unlimited domains on Cloud Sites, and the Control Panel makes it easy to provision a new site almost instantly. Call me or go to the sign up page to get started today!

    (501)291-1375 [email protected]

    Powered by Rackspace Cloud Computing

    Want your site on a scalable “cloud” architecture?30-day We can have your site up and running, harnessing the power of server “clustering” like Google does. And at a price that’s not much higher than a shared hosting plan. Instead of your site having to fight for resources when they are most needed, an army of resources are always on standby ready to fight for it.

    The main benefit of hosting your blog or website on the cloud instead of a dedicated server, or even worse a managed host in which you are having to share access to the RAM with many other sites that they are cramming you on with? Elasticity. If your traffic spikes, your server will expand to 1, 3, 10 or however many servers are needed to handle it. This is true of even the $9.95 package. It’s the same technology as the $149/mo full cloud site. And if for some reason you use more bandwith (remember only outbound bandwidth is counted, meaning hits to your site) than the package includes (nice problem to have) it’s only 50 cents per GB of overage. That’s the most efficient way possible to grow as well as getting the elasticity that always running for you in the background.

    Questions?

    Call or text me on my Google Voice (501)291-1375, email me at [email protected], or hit me up on Twitter if you are interested or have anymore questions.

    Here’s more information about Rackspace Cloud Sites

    A brief history of Rackspace Cloud Sites (formerly “Mosso”).

    *What are compute cycles?

    Compute cycles measure how much processing time your applications require on the Rackspace Cloud. Using 10,000 compute cycles in a month is roughly equivalent to running a server with a 2.8 GHz modern processor for the same period of time.

    How many compute cycles will my applications use?

    Since web applications vary so greatly, it’s hard to make a perfect guess. However, there are some guidelines that can help. First, you can think of 10,000 compute cycles as being about the same processing power as you’d get from a decent dedicated server or Amazon EC2 instance. For example 10,000 compute cycles would power:

    • about 2.1 million page views using a database-driven content management system
    • about 11 million page views of rackspacecloud.com
    • about 25 million requests for a static 15KB image

    How do I track my compute cycle usage?

    The compute cycles you use are presented in your control panel in near real time.

    What goes in to calculating a compute cycle?

    Mostly, CPU processing time. However, compute cycles also account for the disk I/O your application’s operations consume. For example, a page with heavy database queries will consume more compute cycles in part due to the larger volume of disk I/O it requires.

    Frequently Asked Questions about Rackspace Cloud Sites

    What is Cloud Hosting?

    Ready to Get Started?

    I’ve already got a Rackspacecloud Site provisioned. All I have to do is add your site to it and you’ll be able to create a username and password for your own secure access to the Cloud Site’s control panel. Just contact me or go directly to the sign up page to see the information I need to get you going, and fill it out and submit it if you have decided to purchase.

    Stephen Pickering

    Little Rock, AR.

    Telephone: +1(501)291-1375

    Email: [email protected]

    Twitter: @Pickering

     

     

    Video: @scobleizer talking with the “Cloud Guy” at Rackspace @bpiatt about the benefits of the Cloud.

    Take me to the sign up page now!

    Need more information? Email me: [email protected] or Phone or Text me: 501-291-1375   (Outside of the U.S. dial +1 first). Or here’s my more detailed CONTACT PAGE.

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  • Facebook’s FriendFeed Acquisition Could Be the Best Thing to Happen For Both Services and It’s “Sharecroppers”

    This a contrarian view, and if I were betting on it I would put my chips in Dave Winer’s corner. That Facebook just bought FriendFeed for its genius, ex-Google Engineers, namely Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor, and that the site will eventually die. Also he feels the users, and that’s an appropriate word, especially guys like Robert Scoble and Louis Gray who evangelized and put so much time and energy into the service, who really made the service, were used to build the audience and then sold down the river for 50 million, leaving many months of energy and data wasted. I get that. I would probably bet that’s what will in fact, take place.

    But let’s pause for a moment. I’ve been noticing in the past couple of days after the acquisition that more people have suddenly started following me on FriendFeed. Now that may be anecdotal, but I was thinking that maybe we got this thing wrong. The facts are, as great of a service FriendFeed is, and I believe that it is the best Social Media experience on the web, they simply weren’t getting traction. They weren’t growing. Now I would argue that they should have just given it more time, but I’m not as smart as Paul Bucheit or Michael Arrington, and as I believe was mentioned in the ClueTrain Manifesto, the “build it and they will come” philosophy simply doesn’t work anymore. It takes many more dimensions now a days, especially that of timing. Perhaps if FriendFeed would have been build two years ago, it would have been the “Twitter” of now. Look at Bing. It’s supposed to be as good of a mouse trap as Google, but it’s too late. So now Microsoft has done a Yahoo deal to get more exposure.

    The FriendFeed team are engineers, perhaps some of the best software engineers in the World, but perhaps they don’t have the skills of how to build a big, network effect audience. But now they’ve married the people who knew how to build the biggest audience in the world. Also, besides Gmail, Paul innovated and built some of Google’s advertising products. So he may also be an expert in search monetization, and perhaps the most qualified person in the world to figure out how to monetize Real Time Search. That’s just what Facebook is struggling with. They have the audience, and now they need a genius to figure out how to monetize it. This could be a perfect marriage, and the result could be not only a fantastically successful Facebook, but a better product and so better for the “users.”

    Will FriendFeed continue as a stand alone site? Probably not. But there are strong paradigms in its favor. First, it is the best Social Media product in the market. It doesn’t have an audience or at least a big enough one. But now it’s getting exposure to 300 million other users. It doesn’t take a big percentage of those folks signing up for the service to make it viable in its own right. Also, as mentioned in the book “Free” by Chris Anderson, the costs of running such a website is halving each year. You combine those two synergistic principles and you may have a site that not only continues to run, but actually still be innovative and perhaps as much of a household name as Twitter is becoming.

  • Customize Your WordPress Page Tab Links


    How to customize where your page tab links to in wordpress? It’s easy. There’s a plug in called “Page Link To” you can download directly from your “add new plug-ins” panel inside of wordpress (just go to plugins in your dashboard and “Add New” and search for ‘Page Links To’) or visit their page here: http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/page-links-to/ and download it there. Does this trick in seconds. This is incredibly useful because one could link to a flickr account for example instead of creating your own photo gallery, or if you link to a category it helps bring those posts back to life instead of kind of being buried there in the sidebar. It also helps re-invigorate interest in your own blog by bringing that older material back to the forefront, so that you can curate, iterate some more and by restoring a sense of continuum and wholeness to the themes and ideas of your blog, which will energize your creativity as you move forward.

    pagelinksto

    Special thanks goes out to the editorial staff at WPBeginner.com for finding this solution for me. I wanted to create a page called “Poems,” and then I thought, “Why can’t it just link the page tab to the category search result for poems, and provide an instant list of all the posts that I had categorized as such, instead of me having to reprint the poems or creating a new list and links manually?” They responded to my inquery very quickly and found this solution for me. This is a staff that cares, is interested in their business. It’s one of the best sites for learning and finding answers about WordPress. They are very engaging. One of their staff even posted a comment on this post, giving me a tip before I had finished iterating it myself.

  • The Best Commenting Engine for Your Blog
    *Update 10/30/09 I'm changing my mind here. With Disqus's latest update I believe it is just as good or maybe even better. For one thing Disqus is more widespread which makes it by default more social. Also, Disqus has a webpage where all your comments are aggregated so that you can easily access them and which can be indexed. Most feed aggregators use Disqus, so that all of your comments will be automatically sucked into them, if you so choose. This gives your comments a bigger footprint. I used FriendFeed, and I don't think they accept JS-Kit yet. I assume the other aggregators are similar. Now with JS-Kit you can manually choose to send your comments to various social networks, but since its not automatic, its tiresome to individually select and choose each one. So usually you don't, and your comment remains in a "silo." Now, the advantage to JS-Kit is that it's smoother and real-time, and I assume they will add all the features that Disqus has in the future. But it all depends on how popular the engine gets for it to be a default for the feed aggregators, which may or may not happen. So as of this moment I would suggest that you go with Disqus, or at the very least, if you don't add it to your blog, get an account, so that you can use it to comment on other blogs, most of which use it, if they use anything at all. It's a real-time commenting engine for your blog or website that also gives you the power to propagate your comments across your entire social graph. It turns a static, "block-like" commenting section into something that is more alive like a river. It keeps the discussion of a blog post, or other content, on the content page itself. And when the comment section comes alive more value is added to the original content itself. It also benefits all of the social networks because comments become additional content that's added to their site. Also, it encourages commenting because they are more recognized, responded to in real time and propagated, if you want, to all or some, whatever you choose, of your various other social graphs. The company, JS-Kit, totally rocks. I love their attitude. It's about innovation. This new system, "Echo", will be coming out in a couple weeks, but if you want it, be sure and go to their site and sign up now, because they will be sending out invitations, or opportunities to install it, on a first come, first serve basis, to those who send out a special tweet.
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