Josh Surber World's okayest dad

Over five years since I last wrote in my blog. During that time, my wife and I have celebrated our ten year anniversary and moved to a different city, and I have switched jobs, where I was promoted to a position of huge responsibility. I have also posted almost two thousand tweets. While I have often kept this blog on life support by paying the hosting bills, I haven’t really thought much about doing anything with it in a long time. Most of the things I would write I tweet instead. However, a near death experience (for my site) recently made me think that I should make an honest effort to do something here.

I was in the process of trying to switch over my database from MySQL to SQLite, as my host charges extra for MySQL. In the process, I deleted everything. Fortuitously I had made a backup first, so I was able to salvage everything. In the process, I went back and deleted a whole lot of zero-substance entries (turned out to be close to 75%) and realized that I miss blogging.

Do you have a personal site or blog? How much do you pay for it? If you are like most people who host their own blog, you more than likely pay around $5 or $10 a month, and another $10 a year for your domain. This comes out to around $100 a year.

Let me tell you how I keep my blog up for under $30 a year. (It would be under $20 but I bought a second domain for my URL shortener).

Ever since I switched to 1&1 internet I have been dissatisfied. No really big problems with them that would make me recommend against them; I just felt they weren’t right for me. I don’t like their billing policies (why charge for my hosting in February then for the domain in March?), I don’t care for their control panel, I don’t like the way the user and host of my MySQL database are even more obfuscated than the password I randomly generated.

I had been thinking of packing up and moving to Lifehacker favorite Namecheap for a while anyway, so when Namecheap offered a to let me move my domain for cheap while helping wildlife, just as my 1&1 account was due for renewal, I took it as a sign from [insert deity here].

I already had an account with NearlyFreeSpeech.net, one of Lifehackers five best personal web hosts. Rather than charge you by the month, they charge you by usage. However, this will almost always come out cheaper for a personal site. It may even be cheaper for a big professional site. They have a calculator so you can get an estimate of how much your site will cost, and I will be quite suprised if it is more than you are paying now. They are also the only host I know of that doesn’t make you pay a premium for SSH access; everyone gets SSH included in their hosting. You can sign up and feel your way around for free before you invest any money, and they don’t lock you into any contracts. They aren’t as easy to use as some hosts, but if you are familiar with Unix/Linux or the Mac OS X command line, you should be okay.

You don’t want to host your domain with them, though. For one thing, you are limited to a few TLDs. For another, domains cost about the same everywhere, but NFSN doesn’t have an affiliate program. Get your domain somewhere else that has one, then you can make use of that to pick up a few bucks on the side. Again, I recommend Namecheap.

Another reason is that you’ll pay around $10 a year for email forwarding from NFSN. Hosting it elsewhere lets you use their (probably cheaper) email forwarding to your existing email account, or you can set up Google Apps for your domain for free, as long as you aren’t going to have many users.

After you have set up your NFSN and Namecheap accounts, you will need to set up your domain to point to your site. Set up to use the NFSN DNS, and then follow the directions in this FAQ entry.

At this point you are already going to save a lot of money on your site, but you can really crank up your savings using CloudFlare. CF is for servers what OpenDNS is for clients: it handles their DNS for them, while adding safety and speed features on as an added bonus. It is free and really easy to set up; so easy I’m not going to walk you through it. Once it is set up, though, it will cache several of your resources, saving on bandwidth charges from NFSN while speeding up your site. After it is working, cancel your DNS from NFSN (CF replaces it anyway) to save an extra $3.65 a year.

 

Make sure you have plenty of time before doing any of this though: there are several DNS changes required through this entire process, each of which can take hours. If you use OpenDNS (and you should) then their CacheCheck feature can help, but you can still spend an entire weekend easily moving your site. However, the savings can be well worth it.

I must tip my hat to the developers of Ubuntu.

My wife’s friend Michael isn’t quite computer literate. He was complaining to my wife about how he always got viruses. She told him how we don’t since we use Linux instead of Windoze. He didn’t understand how you can use a computer without Windoze on it. She told him we would give him an install disk so he can try it out. I handed him the disk and told him to follow instructions.

About an hour later he called, asking where all his stuff was. He had successfully installed Linux without any help, but was confused by the default empty desktop, since the installer told him it had imported all his crap. I pointed him over the phone to the “Places” menu, and he got it. He wasn’t online last I heard because he had to find out what his grandpa’s router’s WPA key was, but other than those tiny hitches, someone who didn’t even know you could replace Windoze managed to install Ubuntu with no help!

If you have a good connection and a burner, why not download Ubuntu yourself, and give it a try too? You can run it side by side with Windoze, and delete it if you don’t like it after a week or two, so you have nothing to lose, but a great deal of frustration.

I am building some apps just for myself with the open source Code Ignitor framework. I have always stayed away from frameworks. Not because I feel they make you lazy (lazy programmer = productive programmer = happy programmer), I just don’t like having to bend my code to the way someone else thinks I should write it. I normally stay away from any library that offers more than two or three functions, but after playing with CI trying to go back to straight PHP just feels clunky.

The main nice things about making your own web apps is that:

1. You don’t have to worry about licensing issues
2. You can hard code in stuff such as passwords and preferences
3. You don’t have to include everything.

That last item could use some explaining. When you create a normal web app, you need to consider everything that a user could want to do and either include or ignore it. When you are making something that you will be the only one to use, you only have to worry about the stuff that you want to do often. The little one-off cases (such as changing a password) can be done directly in source files or SQL. No sense spending an entire afternoon allowing yourself to change a password when you can do it directly from the command line, and you will only do so every couple of months.

If you are looking to escape from both proprietary web apps and being tied to a single computer (or syncing files) I would recommend that you download CodeIgnitor, read the user guide, and make it yourself.

The open source movement’s motto has long been “Free as in speech, not as in beer.” Of course, I go for both as I am poor 🙂

After reading Features vs Freedom, I realized that I use mostly non-free software. I had thought myself big on free software, but had not considered the fact that web apps aren’t really free. I use a lot of Google’s web apps. Nearly all of them, in fact. I am trying to change that.

I am still using GMail because my web host’s POP and IMAP servers don’t seem to work. However, I have weaned myself from my favorite Google app, Reader, for Vienna, a desktop aggregator. I am also using the bookmarks built into my browser, (Camino), instead of Google’s bookmarks.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love the way Google makes their stuff, I just want to have as much freedom as possible. This is my computer, after all. Shouldn’t I be able to control the stuff on it?