Informed Networker Blog

Who uses the Google Toolbar? I do. Why? Not because I actually use any of its features, but mainly because it displays the PageRank for websites which in turn helps me gauge their reliability, popularity, etc. Week after week I have watched the PageRank for Informed Networker remain at a big fat 0 (on a 10 point scale). Well today I headed on over to the site and was shocked - 4/10. I checked and re-checked, even using popuri.us to triple-check. Sure enough, we really have earned a PageRank of 4/10.

Okay, its still a long way from 8/10 (though not so far from 6/10) or even the coveted 10/10, but its a good start.

On the content side of things, I am hoping to have a chance to add a ton more articles tomorrow. Its been a very crazy week and my time to spend on this site has been much less than desired. On the positive side, I continue to appreciate Andrew’s work with the site and we have had some new visitors lately also who have been helping out. Still, the large majority of visitors remain silent.

Few minor items of interest:

• We continue to accumulate both stories and members.
• Added some CSS to correct issues that arise in Internet Explorer 7 (but not Firefox, Safari, or Opera).
• Updated gravatar images as they had been wiped out with new template.
• Fixed up the footer area, added additional content.

• Revised some of the pages on the site, including About Us, Sponsors, and Contact Us.
• Fixed some bugs in the site template, created a new that only appears in IE (not Firefox or Opera) with logo overlapping navigation.
• Lots of new content being added (this takes up a majority of my time).

Not too much else to report. I continue to make refinements to the site as I have time, but a lot of my time is spent submitting new content on a daily basis.

I’ve been for Bluehost for a little over a month now and figured it might be a good time to give my first impressions of this shared hosting service. Bluehost is a humongous web host - currently hosting over 370,000 domains. It is also a budget host - costing the relatively low rate of $6.95/mo. It is different from many similar hosts in that it only offers one plan - there are no options for virtual private servers or dedicated servers - everything is shared.

Bluehost is a LAMP based service. LAMP stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. In other words, it is not a Windows based environment - which generally includes Windows Server, Internet Information Server (IIS), SQL Server, and ASP.NET. Since for the particular set of sites I was working on I was interested in utilizing application code from WordPress and Pligg - both written in PHP, it made sense to utilize Bluehost rather than attempting to scrunch these PHP applications uncomfortably into my current Windows server hosting.

Let’s take a quick look at the distinctive features of Bluehost’s offering. Storage includes 300 GB. If this isn’t enough for you, you shouldn’t be on shared hosting. In fact, if you get over 10 GB you probably shouldn’t be using shared hosting. Each month you receive 3 TB of bandwidth (3,000 GB). This is a significant amount of transfer, equivalent to around 9 Mb/sec.(1) - thats five T1’s. Granted, again, if you are using anywhere near this capacity you shouldn’t be on shared hosting.

Language support besides PHP includes Perl 5, Python, and Ruby. This runs the gamut of popular server-side languages that operate on Linux. The database servers is another impressive portion - you are allocated up to 50 MySQL databases and 50 Postgre SQL databases.

There are dozens more features that could make this an encyclopedic post - but that wouldn’t be very helpful. I’ll just mention in passing a few and then move on to the final features and a few weaknesses.

Additional standard features include FTP, POP3/IMAP email accounts, email forwarders and autoresponders, cgi-bin, ssi support, frontpage extensions (please don’t tell me you actually use this feature), SSH, webmail, SSL support, and automated backups.

Finally, a few features I consider personally attractive that aren’t standard with many web hosts:

• Marketing - Includes a free PRWeb release ($70 value, sends out a press release to major news venues) and a $50 coupon for Yahoo! Search Advertising (pay-per-click based). Occasionally they also have offers for free coupons on Microsoft and Google advertising as well.
• File Manager - They have a very nice file manager. It is a pleasure to work with and includes features such as uploading a zip and then extracting it all through a browser. It also offers editing options, including code editing right on the server with line numbers, code organization, etc.
• Fantastico De Luxe - Fantastico is a large number of web applications that you can deploy to your server with one click. It includes applications such as WordPress (blog), Drupal (CMS), Joomla (CMS), PHP-Nuke (CMS), phpBB2 (Forums), PHPList (Mailing Lists), TikiWiki (Wiki), and Moodle (Classroom).
• Domain Management - You don’t have to buy a new hosting package for each domain, rather you setup your main domain and then can configure other domains, as well as sub-domains. Essentially, Bluehost is ensuring you never have to buy more than one hosting package (unless you hit the high limits they have set, for example 50 SQL databases).

Now it’s time to discuss the bummers. Here are the areas that Bluehost is really lacking in - though I think you will find them largely comfort items rather than show-stoppers:

• The Control Panel is based on an unfriendly IP based scheme rather than a friendly name based scheme. So you can’t just type in cp.bluehost.com, its more like 69.89.31.96:2082.
• The statistics are way slow. Don’t bother looking at your statistics for the current day, they are entirely inaccurate. You have to wait several hours after the day is done before you can expect accurate statistical tracking.
• You have to register your domains with Bluehost. They serve as your domain registrar. This is a little frustrating for those who already have registered domains and for those who don’t like to place all their intellectual property eggs in one basket.
• The servers are reasonably speedy, but my monitoring has shown ping responses at several hundred milliseconds compared to Google’s sub-hundred millisecond responses.
• This isn’t really Bluehost’s fault, b/c Fantastico doesn’t support these applications currently - but I’d really like to see one-click support for Pligg (Digg Clone CMS) and MediaWiki (the same Wiki that powers Wikipedia).

These complaints aside, if you are a small business or an individual looking for inexpensive LAMP based hosting (as opposed to Windows-based), Bluehost is an excellent and generally reliable option. The ability to one-click deploy the popular WordPress blogging application and other similar applications make it a no brainer for anyone who isn’t technically experienced but wants to move quickly into a live website scenario.
(1)3,000 GB * 1,024 = 3,072,000 MB / 30 Days = 102,400 MB per day / 24 Hours = 4266.67 MB per hour / 60 Minutes = 71.11 MB per min. / 60 Seconds = 1.19 MB per second * 8 (to convert bytes to bits) = 9.48 Mb/sec.

• Upgraded from Pligg 9.8.1 to 9.8.2. This corrects several minor bugs.
• Moved to a new template from Pligg Template called ciCheckBlue. Still a few bugs to work out, but a large step forward.

So, what is InformedNetworker up to these days? How about treading through scores of RSS feeds every day for the best technology related stories? Yup, that takes a lot of time, especially when you are also working full-time. But that’s what nights and weekends are for, right?

Besides that we are working on several other fronts. First is a graphical redesign of the entire site. If you are a designer and interested in this project, leave a comment and we will contact you personally. We are using Pligg, an open source CMS, and while we don’t feel that has to be a negative we know that some major players will write us off simply because right now the template looks just like a hundred other Pligg sites out there. We are actively looking for a designer at this time.

Then we are working on marketing. Thus, we have our three big challenges: (a) keeping new stories flowing in, (b) redesigning the site layout, and (c) marketing the site.