Elliott C. Back: Internet & Technology

It’s an ominous word, that one, and yet it’s incredibly important for me to wake up and realize how little time I have. My day can be divided into a 12 hour chunk from 7 AM to 7 PM when I am working and eating. Then I need 7 hours of sleep. That gives me five hours for the day, less if I work later or have a long dinner, or just want more sleep. There’s not a lot you can get done in small four hour chunks, so I need to set my mind on it and establish some goals for myself, firm, workable goals in order to get them done.

“I’m quite excited about what the future brings for this website and myself.”
“But it won’t happen unless I conspire with all my will.”

First, I need to begin work on secret project X. Tomorrow I will code the backend; php/mysql will suffice to code the functions insert, update, flip, delete, rate, and comment [ed note--done]. Wednesday I will test the backend code against a basic layout. Thursday I will layout the page elements and begin working on the javascript. At this point, secret project X will be nearly done and I can polish details during the weekend, and prepare it for release.

Second, I need to finish the design of my new blog layout. Admittedly, it’s taking a long time. First on my list of priorities is to get my idea of tagging working properly, then to improve the overall layout. The menubar needs a lot of work. The comment form will receive particular attention; my ideas for this are actually innovative, for once. WP 2.1 code needs to be installed immediately, then the usual gamut of caching, searching, etc plugins must be installed and tested and tucked into corners. The theme must be widgetizable.

Third, I just bought a site. It’s the first time I’ve ever done something like this. I’m not quite sure what to do. My thoughts on the matter are: 1) get the site operational on my servers, 2) reduce its operating costs, 3) increase community appeal by allowing visitors to tag and comment on context, 4) monetize, 5) promote. It’s going to be very new to be trying to turn over a business site, instead of the usual pseudo-personal blob dabbling I’ve done.

Finally, I have another idea for a business-oriented site that will leverage the “blogs are hot” mentality. It will probably take about a month of undivided time to execute, because the service it provides will be quite high-load. However, I had an inspiration last night for the interface and I will jot it here:

^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^ ^^

    = - .. a
    = - .. b
    = - .. c
    = - .. d

  ## ## ## ##

I am really not kidding you ^.^! If I can accomplish these four menial tasks, I will have accomplished the following goals:

• Diversified my online holdings
• Founded new profitable, self-sustainable business
• Increased the worth of my existing blog properties
• Won the undying affection of my Wendy

I know it all sounds a little vague, endearingly romantic, and naive, but trust me on this one. I’m a professional, I’m in my game, and I’m going to turn out some good work soon. I just need to focus my mind away from the distractions of games, movies, tv, books, sloth, food, and all those things that slow the mind, and keep low the spirit. Fly, Halcyon! Fly, Moon!

Not that I’m a master of the English language, but I’ve managed to confuse Facebook’s verb-conjugating system:

That’s right “he love work.” When you update your status on Facebook, it decides that first person pronouns like “I” or “Me” should be automatically converted to “He” or “His.” Basically, the form prompts you with your own name to write about yourself in the third-person: “Elliott is: ________”. Then, it proceeds to butcher whatever you put into that form.

Why couldn’t it do something reasonable, like ask “Your status: _______” and then display to the work “Elliott’s status: _____ .” I guess that would be too obvious.

Media Temple has an excellent article on their blog about the abuse of their poor MySQL servers on the “grid”. Their problems stemmed from a new user-base who had poorly performant web-applications:

Having an 8-year history of catering to high-demand websites we thought we had seen it all but this new level of load “requirement” was blindsiding. Our new offering quickly became a refuge for sites that were kicked off their old hosting company; a common industry practice. Because of their high database load “requirements” and need of resources, these site owners were shut down immediately and told to leave other hosts. Many of these “orphaned” users had applications, code, and query instructions that were grossly inefficient for even a massive dedicated server.

This is something sites like Wordpress.com don’t have to worry about, because they’re running their own code. They know they’ll scale by adding more hardware. That’s something harder to say when an idiot who’s hacked their blog software to do 1000s of cartesian joins suddenly connected to a mysql cluster node and takes it down. And if he fails over to another one…