Blue Forest Blog is now running on Dreamhost. It was running on a server shared with a couple of other projects, and in order to reduce the memory footprint on the server I decided to move it elsewhere. Dreamhost is well-regarded and offered a good environment and excellent price for hosting it, so I decided to take it there. Moving it required only about 10 minutes of work and downtime. If you tried to access it during the move, I apologize for its unavailability.

I’ve also moved Shiny Things over to Dreamhost. And I tried moving the Apocalypse Blog as well but messed something up (it was me, not them) and will try again in a day or two.

I’ll post later about my experiences using Dreamhost. So far it’s been very positive and easy.

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There are several things that designers often leave out of their projects… often, security, privacy, administrative interfaces and monitoring are things that are addressed later, if ever. That’s a very bad position to be in when you’re designing network protocols - if the protocol is implemented by more than one organization, or if it’s widely successful, it can be very difficult to get an update out which addresses these areas. Compatibility issues can also be a killer problem.

Web sites often have the same issues. Sometimes the administrative interface to a web site is simply an admin typing SQL commands to its database. Quite often security is almost an afterthought and there’s little consideration paid to it beyond requiring users to login with a password that’s likely stored in cleartext in the site’s database.

If you want your web site to be successful, you really need to know who your users are and how they’re using it. From a very basic perspective, if you’re designing the site with the assumption that everyone will have 1024×768 resolution or better and it turns out that 80% of your users are still at 800×600, you’ve made a grievous error and you’re likely not to have a clue why 80% of your users never come back unless you keep track of this information.

You may want to collect information to help with the design of your web pages and you may it for marketing purposes as well. Tracking things like users’ geographic locations, where inbound links are coming from, resolution and color depth of users’ displays, the browsers and platforms users are using, and how long users spend on the site and which pages they look at, can be extremely useful in deciding where to invest your development and marketing resources.

Your web server likely tracks some of it in its logs, and if you have access to the logs and to tools like awstats, you may be able to get some information on your users - and for some people this is a fine and appropriate solution. A simpler solution for everyone else is to use a tool like Google Analytics.
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We’re all Mac in-house but when you’re working in the world of software, if you’re doing anything web or World of Warcraft-related, you definitely need to test against Windows occasionally.

On the web side of things, Internet Explorer, while having the largest market share of any web browser, is also the most eccentric of web browsers when it comes to its interpretation of standards. And unfortunately, even the fact that you’re programming in LUA under World of Warcraft doesn’t mean that you won’t encounter problems related to the underlying OS.

For example, Mike has an add-on for World of Warcraft that supports his web site Epic Mount, for WoW guilds. The add-on is working fine under MacOS X but as of this week’s 2.1 update to WoW, is crashing randomly on Windows machines. Not having a Windows machine handy to test it with is a problem.

I used to use Windows all the time, until my Thinkpad caught on fire and Mike’s gentle pestering of “get a mac!” finally won out. I haven’t regretted the switch at all; I have a much better user experience using my Mac, and I have Unix under the hood for the software work I want to do, so no more fidgety hassles trying to get Perl or MySQL to work under Windows. As time goes by, though, my Windows-fu becomes weaker.

We do run Windows under MacOS X on our Intel Macs, via a nifty piece of software called “Parallels Desktop”. Parallels uses the Intel CPU’s native “virtualization” support to trick Windows into thinking it has the machine to itself. There’s very little performance penalty for most operations, but rather than talk directly to the hardware, hardware access has to be emulated. That means that rather than talk to the ethernet card directly, Windows talks to Parallels, which pretends (in software) to be the ethernet card, and makes shared access to the actual ethernet card work. This adds a lot of overhead to hardware accesses. Perhaps the worst issue here is video display card access… Parallels has to pretend (in software again) to be a video card. World of Warcraft has relatively stringent video card requirements; it requires hefty 3D acceleration support to run in even the most minimal mode. Parallels doesn’t yet offer that level of support. Which means, unfortunately, that while the Parallels solution is fine for testing against Internet Explorer under Windows, it won’t help us with testing with World of Warcraft.

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