And here's why. First they are pretty damn affordable, for example they have a Thanksgiving special going on right now where you get your hosting package for $9.95 US for the year. And you might say yeah, even at that price I can get the same thing elsewhere. But you would be wrong because siteground.com not only provides web hosting they provide AWESOME customer service.
If I had to pick one instance of why I think this way I would talk about a situation I got myself into by neglecting to read my email. As many web developers do, I have numerous domains and numerous hosting accounts set up. Some are successful and some projects just get abandoned, well I had a project I had abandoned but still had set up to auto-renew the hosting agreement with siteground. Problem was I did not pay attention to my email for a couple months and bang one day I was stuck holding the bill. Upset about the situation I called siteground.com and asked them to just shut off the account, not caring too much about the money I had just lost since it was my fault anyway for not paying attention. Without prompting the siteground.com representative proposed transfering the credit from the abandoned project onto one the accounts I actually use. Brilliant! Most companies just keep your money one you hand it to them, but siteground.com was more interested in my long term satisfaction, and it has worked.
I am a professional web developer and also have hobby projects I do. I've seen the enormous costs that companies pay for their hosting, and I've seen the lackluster support they recieve from hosts whom they pay thousands of dollars PER MONTH for their hosting, yet I get responses from siteground.com much faster at a fraction of the cost. So if you are in the market for web hosting, I really only have one thing to suggest: siteground.com
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3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097494459230781640628...
...you know the rest. It's Pi. It's great. And now you can work on remembering to rest of it with 'Digits of Pi' an educational app for Windows Phone 7. It supports the first 100,000 digits of Pi, so have a try.
It's available now for Free in the Windows Phone Marketplace -> http://windowsphone.com/s?appid=7624d49f-1743-48d2-a20a-4278e8b7b63aThe premise of this app I have created is simple, you just enter the digits of pi and everything goes along smoothly until you enter a wrong digit. At that point the number you selected turns red and the number you should have chosen turns green.
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My PR for the half marathon distance. Two weeks prior I had run the Philadelphia Half Marathon with a goal of 2 hours, I ran 2 hours 7 minutes. Angrily I ran this race to try and redeem myself. Redeemed I was, coming in at 1:53:49
This was probably the best race I have ever ran in terms of me and racing... i kept good form and stayed focused on my goal for nearly 2 hours. :)
Place Div/Tot Sex/Tot Bib Name S Age City St Clock Pace
286 25/39 205/394 1765 Jason Carter M 33 Howell NJ 1:53:49.47 8:42
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Here is the iRule we came up with to handle our mobile device detection and site redirection.
First we check for things we know are desktops, since desktop traffic to our site is more common vs mobile devices at this point we put that first in our comparison, and we start with the most traffic user agents. This makes the comparisons a little more efficient.
This traffic is sent to our f5 Webserver Pool. Next, we look for our mobile device user agents and redirect them to our externally hosted mobile website. Following that, any unidentified traffic is sent to the f5 Webserver pool.
when HTTP_REQUEST {
set ua [HTTP::header User-Agent]
switch -glob [string tolower $ua]] {
"*windows nt*" -
"*macintosh*" -
"*windows 98*" -
"*linux*" -
"*windows 6.0*" -
"*windows xp*" -
"*mac_powerpc*" -
"*crawler*" -
"*spider*" -
"*nutch*" -
"*slurp*" -
"*googlebot*" -
"*feedfetcher*" -
"*msnbot*" -
"*ask jeeves*"
{
pool WWW_Pool
}
"*ipod*" -
"*iphone*" -
"*windows ce*" -
"*opera mini*" -
"*android*" -
"*blackberry*" -
"*palm*" -
"*treo*" -
"*htc*" -
"*psp*" -
"*lg*" -
"*samsung*"
{
HTTP::redirect http://m.website.com
}
default
{
pool WWW_Pool
}
}
} -
Here we look at the need to be able to place some formatted content, that is somewhat one-off in nature on a page.
For example, the "Look what's new at the Help Desk!!!" section of the CIS Main page on the old Hovworks site. This is a bit of text, it is formatted to have a background, it has 2 phrases hyperlinked to another page, and it has an image.
We will look at a solution that allows the user to create this rich content using a WYSIWYG editor.
First, navigate to the page on which you wish to place your rich content. Click on the Page tab.
Click Edit Page, Then click Add a Web part in the region of the page you wish your content to appear.
Select Media and Content from the Categories Section, choose Content Editor from the Web parts section, Click Add.
Your Content Editor web part is now on the page, Click on 'Click here to add new content'.
Manipulate the content until it meets your desires.
Remove focus from the Content Editor web part, and Click and Drag the Image Viewer web part title heading.
As you drag it up above the Content Editor Web part, you should see it move, and see the horizontal line being placed to show the content will be placed above. Go ahead and drop the Image Viewer Web part above the Content Editor Web Part.
The Image Viewer Web Part is now displayed above the Content Editor one...
In the top right corner of the Content Editor web part, select Edit Web part from the menu.
Adjust the settings to the following, different settings are ok for different display and/or features.
Click Ok. Then click Stop Editing
Your rich content now displays on your page. Here we have content with a heading, background, hyperlinks and an image.
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We get a lot of competitors visiting our website, and I thought it would be interesting to keep an eye on them.
Using a simple filter in Google Analytics you can identify traffic originating at your competitors offices if they identify themselves via the ISP organization. Just use their names from the hostnames report in Analytics, and use the or operator in your search.
From here I can see that 34 of my competitors have completed the information request form on my web site.
Perhaps that can be fodder for the argument to increase counter intelligence measures...
If not maybe seeing your competitors clicking your adwords will spark marketings ire...
Here you can see that several hundred clicks have been performed by our competitors.
Get creative and there is a lot that Google Analytics can tell you.
Or just use it like this and find out who is really sweatin ya...
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One of the ways I use Google Analytics is to monitor the load balancing of my web servers. I set up a new profile in Analytics and set my filters to accept special tags I have output by the webservers each declaring its name. it is not useful for real time administration of your cluster however as a sanity check and historical record accessible with all the was and familiarity of Google Analytics. I can set up automated reports to management and have intelligence alerts monitoring for various changes.
I used an Include Filter looking for Load Balancing:
And a search and replace filter like so:
Then included the following analytics javascript on my pages, my ASP vbscript outputs the servername KHCMS3p in this case to the HTML response to the browser:
pageTracker._trackPageview("/LoadBalance/KHCMS3P");
Things look pretty well balanced here:
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The Major League Yabbo's [Jess & Damian Bomm, Greg Braun, Jason Carter, and ???] ran the Beast of the East mud run at McGuire AFB ON 9/10/11. It was my first mud run and it was fun, nobody got hurt and it made for some good memories. We ran through swamps, low crawled through mud holes, climbed all sorts of obstacles... Never did anything like it before, when I got to the first obstacle I had to pause for a moment before realizing oh yeah this is what it's all about, that first obstacle was the low crawl so they really got us into it right from the start. Once you have low crawled through a mud pit, it is not intimidating to run right through the rest. I did not like how everyone slowed down at the obstacles, that was a real momentum killer. They had many jersey barriers on the course and a few of them had lines waiting to jump them. So you would run up stand there then climb over from a dead stop. We got really muddy and I threw my shoes in a dumpster at the end.
We got these coins for participating, I thought they were really cool coins. Some other people were like 'A coin? WTF? What am I going to do with coin?' but I collect coins, and it is sort of a Military tradition to give out these Challenge Coins so maybe they didn't know that type of thing existed or that it was a military thing or they just don't collect coins like I do. It's a really unique coin I think since it is stamped with the date 9/10/11 how many other coins are there like that? Hopefully all the other runners throw out their coins and mine becomes rare!
Here is the course map, I used Photoshop CS5 Photomerge feature to stitch the images together, it could have been better I should have captured more images, the bottom right leg of the course doesn't quite align properly, but the essence of the course is there.
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<>772 JASON CARTER Start: 10:40:41 Finish: 12:04:30 Time: 1:23:49 Pace: 13:31 CIVILIAN TEAM OF 5 MAJOR LEAGUE YABBOS 34 332nd M-30 to 39
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I attended the George Sheehan classic for my second time in 2011, it wasn't quite was I was expecting. I had so much fun my first time here that I'm really disappointed the second time wasn't as good. My problem is I became a father and had my daughter in a running stroller.
They did not advertise on their race flyer or website that no strollers were allowed in the race. I registered the day before at the tent they had set up in Marine Park and I specifically asked the workers about strollers and if it would be ok. They said their insurance company could not let them promote running with strollers. This was their chance to say no. Instead they told me they could not promote it, which I took as ok go ahead and run with a stroller.
Race day came along and I was standing way at the back of the pack all the way behind everyone so as to not be the annoying person at a race with a stroller when they race director got on the microphone and proclaimed 'NO STROLLERS, I REPEAT NO STROLLERS ARE ALLOWED IN THIS RACE, DON'T BE THAT PERSON THAT CAN'T FOLLOW THE RULES. I REPEAT, NO STROLLERS.'
So ugh, I'm sitting there with a stroller, and a race number 5 minutes or so before start time. So I walked over to the race director and told him that it said nothing on the website, said nothing on the flyer, and that his workers essentially let me through the process so i could stand at the starting line and be made to look like some jerk who ignores rules and makes people have a bad time.
I ran the race anyway, but I had 3 or 4 people make nasty comments, not to me, but off into the air so I could plainly hear them anyway. I told them all of the position the race director put me in as I ran.
They were fine with strollers when they took my money...
This is a nice 5 mile race. There are usually kids with hoses spraying down the runners as they pass through the neighborhoods, lots of support out there on the course spread pretty evenly almost the whole way. There is a big hill conveniently placed about 1 mile from the end.
