Dreamhost satisfied customer

While DreamHost certainly has its problems, I prefer them over a host of other web hosting providers for a variety of reasons, but it mainly boils down to turn around time. A colleague of mine, Matt Keith, had emailed me asking why I prefer DreamHost over Verve hosting, and my response got so long I decided to just turn it into a blog post. It ended up not so much being a DreamHost versus verve comparison, but a statement on why I prefer to roll with DH.

Disclaimer: I’m part of the DreamHost affiliate program and if you end up registering after clicking one of my links, then I get a credit for the referral.

Steven Wright Aphorisms

For fun today I learned how to run a bash script from PHP, and implemented everybody’s favorite command line utility: fortune! The script takes advantage of php’s exec() command, and ended up looking something like this:

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<?php
exec ("/opt/local/bin/fortune -s", $lines_of_output, $error_code);
if (!$error_code) {
	foreach ($lines_of_output as $line) {
		print $line."\n";
	}
} else {
	print "script failed with exit code $error_code, see http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/exitcodes.html";
}

Check out the two beta versions I’ve created here (Hit refresh in your browser to get a new fortune).

• Your daily online fortune cookie.


• Steven Wright aphorisms.

These are meant to be part of a larger project intended to expose these quotes via RSS to incorporate them into some dynamically created “signature” lines, which is part of some new Gmail functionality available from Google Labs.

travelers webtools

As a traveler, a tech person, and occasional internet addict, I’ve been slowly scouring the web over the past few years for the most useful sites and computer tools I can find to help the independent globetrotter while on the road in distant countries. These tools range from travel forums, to wiki guides, to finding free worldwide accomodation, to getting there cheaply.
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DIY GTD

I´ve recently been given some web design projects to work on for the next few weeks while in Ecuador. So today as i am getting back into the swing of work I somehow became distracted (for better or worse, is still to be determined) by this new thing floating around the web being blogged, highly praised and supported mainly by the mac geek / programmer / web designer / blogger crowd. Its commonly tagged as GTD which stands for a productivity technique coined by David Allen’s book Getting Things Done. There’s lots of support and ideas (AJAX websites (like 43folders.com, downloadable software plugins to your favorite apps such as “Kinkless”) popping up around the idea, and incase you dont want to buy the book you can get an idea of what its all about from the MineZone site’s notes from the book. I have particularly picked up on the idea of the formalized idea about a hipster pda and found some useful cutout templates to printout and use on index cards, to get organized, motivated, and productive.

hello wordpress!

Welcome to WordPress. I just made the switch today to paid hosting at DreamHost.com and couldnt be happier living a free life. I highly recommend DreamHost over blogger, because they have dependable servers and a very affordable plan that now gives you 4700 MB of disk space, 120 GB/Month bandwidth, and tons of other great goodies to help you get your very own personally managed website. They provide easy “One-click install” of WordPress and many other useful web content management tools. But I have to admit that i did run into problems with the Blogger to WordPress Import mechanism. As usual, a few minutes spent on google found my solution and within 30 minutes I was hapily up and running. Now comes the process of customising the site to my hearts content. yippie!