Foreign Perspectives

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After much tinkering around with other peoples’ Wordpress templates, I figured that it was time that I wrote my own one.

That sounds like it would be a major undertaking but in reality it’s not nearly as difficult nor timeconsuming as you’d think basically because a lot of the groundwork has already been done so it’s effectively tinkering around but on a slightly larger scale.

Anyway, I’ve been plugging away with that off and on for the last month or two over at SevaTeem and it looks like it’s getting close to the time when I’ll be able to release it on an unsuspecting public. As a bit of preparation for that day, I’ve started to roll it out on some of my little family of blogs with the one over at Our Inns probably being the closest representation to the final product although as it’s going to offer loads of options it could well look quite different and Personally Chosen is also using it.

What’s needed next is the addition of some options to avoid people needing to dive in and edit the code itself.

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Selecting webhosting is always something of a gamble as it’s difficult to get a truly objective view of what a new host will be like.

There’s also the not inconsiderable problem that there are hundreds if not thousands of hosts out there, all with different hosting plans and prices. This at least you can do something about with services such as Web Hosting Choice which offers you a fairly comprehensive range of search options to find that “perfect” hosting service for you, or at least to thin out the choice somewhat.

Although they offer loads of options on the search, in reality you’d be crazy to attempt to use all of them. In fact, for most people perhaps the most significant ones to go for are probably:

• the cost. Don’t go too low: remember that you usually get what you pay for;
• the diskspace. Don’t go overboard with this as you can always upgrade your plan;
• the bandwidth. Don’t believe “unlimited” if you really do intend to use a massive amount of bandwidth;
• any special software that you require and in this context remember that even apparently “standard” software isn’t included in all plans (typically MySQL may be omitted from the very cheapest plans).

If you’re intending to host more than one website, add to that “addon domains” which saves a fortune by allowing you to host more than one domain in a single account.

Once you’ve reached a sensible number of potential hosting services, that’s the time to check up on their reputation.

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Sometimes it seems like everyone who’s ever designed a website needs to run up a blog to write about it.

Most of the time they tend to fizzle out though or change topics so that they end up being a general blog rather than sticking to their original niche. One design blog does seem to be making something of a point of avoiding that degeneration through collecting rather meaty articles (also a pleasant change from the normal design blogs which generally end up having very short articles) and that’s Stylish (a very popular word to use these days).

What do I mean by “meaty” articles. Well, consider their recent one about the user accounts in Vista. That one is written mainly for techies as it goes on for quite a bit about a facility that you shouldn’t be disabling although, to be fair, many people would like to disable it. Why shouldn’t you disable it? Well, all those annoying little messages that Vista pops up about such and such an application wanting to run are there so that when a malicious piece of software gets installed on your PC, it too will have to ask.

Similarly with a high information content yet perhaps not so accessible as it might be is their article on the spyware community. Yes, it’s useful information to have, but I’d have liked to have had a paragraph saying why it was useful information for you to have and on the whole that’s the problem with this blog: they have a whole lot of really useful information in it but could do with adding a paragraph to each post saying what the information is for.

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