Category: expressionengine
EngineHosting
I have been having problems with my site hosting for close to a year now. Dreamhost had been a solid provider of hosting services before then but then things change. For me, most of the issues had to do with small mistakes which would render my site unusable. Such an incident happened a few days ago when a borked PHP config file caused the Dreamhost server (and therefore my site) to stop parsing PHP files and instead offer them for download. I wish Dreamhost the best, but they need to get their config issues reigned in to have a chance at maintaining their customer base.
I’ve moved to EngineHosting and am so far pleased with what I see. What I find refreshing is that they seem to do things a bit differently than traditional hosting companies. With most hosting companies, they offer minimal direct contact with support staff and a large control panel to allow the customer to do most of the work. With EngineHosting, they offer a modest control panel, but a very responsive staff that handles the mundane config and setup requests. In overall experience, the difference in philosophy reminds me of the difference between self- and full-service gasoline with one big difference: the hosting is the same price.
While all the pages are working, I still need to have EngineHosting support staff initiate a domain registrar transfer and setup one cron-esque process for me so the latest tracks will regularly update. Other than that, the move was not as painful as I had anticipated.
Posted: 04.17.2008Akismet
I've been doing some thinking about how to reduce the amount of comment spam without increasing the burden of posting comments. This post does a good job of detailing some of the options available to EE site operators in to fight comment spam.
I've ditched the CAPTCHAs and have implemented both the White/Black list module and Akismet. I'm hopeful that between the two, comments will be easy to post for everybody and that spam will be manageable.
Posted: 09.07.2007Expression Engine Upgraded to Version 1.6.0
I don't have as much time to work on DigiFiend as I would like as work, home, commute, social, and volunteer commitments keep me busy. And when I do have time to work on the site, I'd prefer to work on things like improving the appearance of the site or adding features like RSS syndication. Today was the day that I told myself that I would do the upgrade.
Luckily for me, Ellis Labs is very good about documentation of EE issues, and there was a very helpful document on how to upgrade the EE to the newest version from a previous version. Even after explicitly following the documentation, I had DigiFiend upgraded in less than one hour.
I'm very happy with the progress made on the site this past week. It's been a while since I have been able to say that.
Posted: 08.24.2007Twitter and EE
Anytime I consider adding something new to my site, I do development on a test template. One of the fantastic things about Expression Engine is the ease of making new templates/pages for testing. My latest desire was to tie in my twitter.com feed into my site. I tried different placements but the best placement seemed to be between the “about site” box and the main blog.
As is usually the case with Expressine Engine, there was a couple of ways I could incorporate the data into my site. Twitter offers an RSS feed, so I could have used either Feedgrab or Magpie to grab the feed items, but I decided to go with a new EE plugin called Twitter Timeline. More features and ease of use were the determining factors.
One last note: I had some problems with the plugin as advertised, but those problems with the plugin were quickly and painlessly resolved after posting a note in the EE forums. The author of the plugin (who happens to be CTO of EE) helped in explaining the issue and adding documentation to future users of the plugin. Support is one of the many reasons I remain pleased with my choice of EE for my publishing needs.
Posted: 04.23.2007