Web hosting and such

When I worked for the Presbyterians over the last three years, we several times looked at options relating to having our own website. (I don't mean the Presbyterian Church as a whole, just our little department.) Usually there was an issue: either the web hosting wasn't what it claimed to be - some of them, especially the free ones, were little more than glorified blogs - or it was too expensive for the sort of work we wanted to do, or it was in the States and not suitable for our approach. Or one of a number of other problems.

So even though I no longer work there I'm always interested in checking out places that offer managed hosting just to see what they have available.

One I've just come across offers something called colocation - or co-location if you're not yet up to joining the prefix to the rest of the word. (Apropos of that, I can never decide whether cooperate needs a hyphen or not - cooperate looks to be such an odd word that my mind immediately reads as coop-erate.)

Though I had an inkling of its meaning, I didn't really know what colocation was, so I had to check it up. Apparently (according to Wikipedia) it allows multiple customers to locate network, server, and storage gear—and connect them to a variety of telecommunications and network service providers—with a minimum of cost and complexity. Well, there you go. Seemingly, as one company puts it, it's like sending your 'little treasures off to boarding school.' It also presumably relies on fast broadband, which is still a bit of an issue itself here in NZ.

Cost is also an issue with getting someone to host your server: you have to be convinced in your own mind that what you're putting up online is really worth those dollars per month. I'm not sure that we got to that point at our office, and in terms of having a site of my own, I've never been keen to part out cash just to have space available for my vast and opinionated musings - or for anything else I might jot down either. But small businesses, especially those that are highly driven by their computer side, certainly need to consider how their data is looked after. Whether they keep it in-house or send it off to 'boarding school.' If you keep your little treasures at home you have all the hassles of making sure your server is working and not going AWOL when you most need it. If you send the data elsewhere, you have to make sure the company looking after it is secure and concerned for your business to the extent that it at least feels as though they think only of you.

So, it's always a bit of a juggling act.

1,000 True Fans

I've just been reading an interesting (and long) blog post by Kevin Kelly (cartoon at right) called 1000 True Fans. I was alerted to it by Seth Godin a few days ago. The Kelly post is actually more than a year old, but suddenly seems to have taken on new life, possibly because Godin 'advertised' on his blog.

Anyway what Kelly has to say is that those artists who are probably never going to make it big-time -or perhaps don't even have the inclination to do so - may, however become well enough known by focusing their attention on 1,000 'true fans.' (Plainly 1,000 is a round number and doesn't have to be adhered to.) Not only will these fans support them financially, but they will keep the artist in a manner which allows him or her to work solely at their art, rather than trying to hold down a day job as well.

These true fans don't have to spend up large to keep the artist going; they may spend only a $100 a year. But that figure by 1,000 adds up to a reasonable sum - in fact most artists probably wouldn't need as much as that to survive comfortably (or to pay their low cost health insurance.)

As I said, the post is long, and there are two subsequent posts that offer further thought on the subject. It's not an original idea from Kelly - he tells us about others who've discussed the possibility before - but he pulls the thing together.

I found one other thing on Kelly's site which I thought was worth sharing. Just when you thought you knew everything about the World Wide Web (does anyone call it that anymore?) here's a different take on it...

More of me on the Net

After more than a year from the first time I heard about it, I’ve finally added myself to the Squidoo lens site. My page is pretty skimpy at present – one can’t do everything in one go, can one – but it’ll improve with time.
The squidoo site tells you to go ahead and make a page. Bit of a tall order when you weren’t expecting to get on with it just right then. It’s rather like a friend of mine who emailed me today to say that something had gone wrong with a mouth operation, and when it was discovered they said, “We’ve got a couple of cancellations this morning; we’ll fix it now under local anaesthetic.” No time for emotional preparation nor nothin’!
That’s a bit like it felt on the squidoo – though obviously a lot less painful.

Being creative

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t tend to mention sport on this blog – much. (I’ve only written about basketball and rugby and possibly a few other suchlike.)

So writing about soccer on here is a bit of a surprise to me. Particularly as it isn’t likely to be related to opera or music, for instance, or to the arts in general. But it’s always a challenge to see if there is a connection, and the first connection I found was a bit of a cheat: it related to soccer and opera – but the opera browser, rather than opera with music.

Of course there’s this connection: soccer made Pavarotti a superstar. Yes, I can remember it doing exactly that when his version of Nessun Dorma was played over shots of the FIFA World Cup back in 1990. Honestly, who had heard of Pavarotti before that – except those opera buffs who would obviously know? Pavarotti went from soccer to the Three Tenors and never looked back.

And finally, (out of a surprising number of choices) there’s opera in a different sense again: David Beckham and soccer soap opera.

Don’t ya jus’ luv the Web? It’s so creative-making?!?!

This is not an ad

I’m always pleased to get a comment on this site (hint!), so eagerly checked out the latest one that came with my recent post on log cabins. It began: “Hello I want to congratulate to you. This site is fantastic, looks like entertained and very good to me it elaborated.” Okay, a bit garbled, but I got the message. And then it went on: “I invite them to that they explore a little on my site of the Web.” What follows is a reasonably well-written piece of prose expounds the benefits of buying a piece of real estate in Costa Rica!
Well, the writer intrigued me and I went and had a look at the site of the Web. Unfortunately, before I could get past the first page I had to register, and I don’t think I’m going to have much opportunity to buy anything in Costa Rica – at least not within the foreseeable future. This is the second piggybacking comment I’ve had in recent weeks. At least they’re better than earlier comments that cut straight to the chase after a quick, ‘Your site’s great and we love you.’

Good old Google!

In the last few weeks I’ve been reading a library book on Google and its search engine, and the way it functions. It was quite an eye-opener. (I’ve forgotten the name of the book unfortunately, because I’ve had to take it back to the library! I’ll check it out and include it here later.)

I hadn’t realised the simple fact that Google doesn’t go searching for something on the Net every time you request a search; it has already copied every item it’s spidered onto its own system, and indexed it and ranked it and done a host of other things to it. Your search then just searches Google itself. But Google doesn’t just give you a bunch of results; it takes your request and works out more about it than you can imagine. How it does this in the twinkling of an eye, I have no idea – but then I’ve never been able to work out how a computer saves a heap of information in a micro-second either. I’ve always had this theory that computers don’t actually save anything, they just pretend they do, and hope that they won’t ever get caught out!

Anyway, all that aside, I’ve just been reading an interesting piece on a blog which talks about how Google is dealing the best way to increase link popularity. Being not as technically-minded in the computer department as I’d like to be, I don’t understand it all, but boiled down it’s saying that in order to push you to the top of the search results, Google looks for now are links pointing to your website from many different sources on the internet. He goes on to say: "Page Rank is still a factor in that scenario, but there is a lot to be said about receiving 1000 links from different websites as opposed to receiving 100 links from different websites with a good Page Rank. Nobody can tell you the exact difference in the quality of one over the other but in our experience 1000 links from different websites with low levels of Page Rank work better in increasing your rankings within the organic results of Google."

I’m not sure who the writer of this particular piece, but it’s well worth reading, and comes from a site called US Web. Part of his follow-up to the info about having lots of links to a site, is to make greater use of blogs, and certainly there’s an increasing understanding that blogs can be far more than just your run-of-the-mill info machine, or john doe’s woes and misfortunes online. They’ve always been a place where links were in abundance, but in this new approach, it’s links with a purpose. Go, Link Popularity!