Kyle D. Skrinak

KDS update 2009-11-03: Title changed, removed “Highly recommended site” from title; added new company name.

This isn’t an exhaustive review of competing solutions, a la Consumer Reports. I had a bad experience rant about godaddy, and now for some good news.

After dealing with somewhere less than 10 competing hosting services, I find myself continually pleased by the web hosting provider “hostmysite.com” (HSM) I learned of them through a customer who uses them for their site. SCI recently performed a critical migration for this customer from a static web site to a dynamic CMS site. At first we experienced HSM committing a number of errors and mistakes. For the first few days, it looked rather bleak, frankly, for HSM. However, when I had an issue, I’d call, and… get support nearly immediately. I’ve never waited more than 2 minutes. Remarkable. And, I get technically competent people who are NOT following those decision flow-charts. If they don’t know the answer, they’re on it until they figure it out. So, they tripped but they did worked until they ironed matters out.

I don’t have the admin control panel (it’s the customers) and so I have a very limited access. I can’t perform a fair UI review — but, really, it’s moot. If I have a problem I can’t fix, I call them and it’s fixed in short order.

If you’re looking for a hosting solution; give them a shot: hostmysite.com

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October 19, 2009 update: I just closed a support ticket with Hosting that we opened on Oct 8. 10 days to resolve a ticket (no FTP access being one of the problems) is clearly significantly problematic. While the phone support remains excellent, such core failure is fatal. I am not recommending these guys for now.

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November 03, 2009 update: From bad to worse: If I need to see or update file and directory permissions, I must issue a ticket. Really. As this is the only .NET hosting vendor with which I work, I can’t say how mainstream this is, but it does seem to stink. For me, the question is; “Is this symptomatic of the vendor, or does .NET tolerate less services for higher cost?

I love this kind of stuff. Here’s a simple command line script that will output xHTML gallery of images in a single directory. Requires ImageMagick and zsh.

for i in sponsor-logos/*.*;do
j=`identify -format "width=\"%[fx:w]\" height=\"%[fx:h]\"" $i`
echo \<div\>\<img src=\"$i\" $j alt=\"$i:t\" /\>\<\/div\>
done

Sure I could have done this in php/rails/whatever, but I needed something quick and valid and output that I later use for the jquery “cycle” plugin (which I love, you can see it in use here, look for the cycling logos on the middle right of the page) and this does the trick.

There’s a dearth of documentation on  the jquery cycle plugin; sounds like a blog post.

Recently, I needed to perform a random sort of lines in vim. After a little bit of googling, I came up with the following:

(Works on Mac OS X Leopard and ubuntu 9.4)

Create the following perl script file:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use List::Util 'shuffle';
my @lines = <>;
print shuffle( @lines );
Save the file and make it executable as well as easily accessible. Such as a directory that is in your PATH variable.

Now, fire up vim and visually select the lines you want to randomly select. Now, type:

!randsort.pl

There it is — randomly sorted lines.