After a short stint with Dreamhost I am moving over to Steadfast Networks for hosting my sites. I really liked the Dreamhost control panel and getting my sites setup and configured was easy but the server I was running on was sooooooooo slow! The billing disaster in January also did not help things! So I headed over to Web Hosting Talk to read some of the reviews and look for a new host. The hosting business is full of “fly by night” kind of folks so it was important to get some objective 3rd party opinions. The wealth of information on WHT is awesome! I decided to go in a different direction and look for a smaller well respected company that does not offer 1 million Terabytes of space for $10 a month. After reading the reviews I settled on a shared hosting plan from Steadfast. So far I have been really impressed. The sites are much faster and the support tickets I submitted were handled almost instantly with 100% resolution! For a simple blog like this speed is not all that important but when you are playing around with a resource hog like Magento it makes a big difference!
I just switched the DNS so we should be live on the new server shortly!
With my move to working more with php and ruby on rails I decided to ditch my windows hosting and move over to Unix and Apache. Most of the active open source projects run better on Apache and the mod_rewrite module is essential for creating easy search engine friendly links. I took a look at a bunch of different providers but settled on Dreamhost. They offer a ton of features for $11 a month and lit looks like they have a pretty good reputation. So far the migration has gone smoothly and everything is up and running. You can get a $50 discount on new hosting contracts if you use promo code: MYDREAM50
Before I started working for Home Depot I was an ASP developer for Gardener’s Supply and Burton Snowboards. I drank a lot of Microsoft kool-aid in those days and was an early adopter of asp.net. Since I was using Microsoft tools at work I never paid attention to any of the open source projects going on in PHP and more recently Ruby on Rails. It was not until I installed Wordpress for this blog did I realize how far these applications had come! So I have ditched my Microsoft allegiance and have started working with some great open source projects like modX and Magento. I am exited to start learning some of these new tools and to start working with PHP and Ruby. My first project was to convert my basic consulting website template over to PHP 
I got my first digital camera in 1999, it was a Kodak DC290 with 2.1 Megapixels. I don’t even want to remember how much it cost. I think it was close to $800! Yikes! Although it was expensive, that camera got me hooked on photography and Photoshop. Over the years I have upgraded and now use a Canon 10D DSLR. The great thing with digital photos is that you are only limited by storage. The downside is that the more photos you take the harder it is to manage them. This is where Smugmug comes into play.
Smugmug is a photo sharing site that a lot of people still have not heard of. I signed up for Smugmug a few years ago an instantly became a huge fan. For $40 a year you get unlimited storage and bandwidth. That alone makes it a great deal, but throw in LOTS of great tools to manage your photos and share them with friends and it becomes a GREAT application! If you have not seen Smugmug I highly recommend them!
Here is a photo we took at Stone Mountain a few weeks ago:
Wordpress is the blogging software I am using for this blog. I had dinner last week with Sam Decker at eTail and he told me to go with Wordpress or Typepad, Wordpress is free so I thought I would try it out first.
All I can say is WOW! These guys know what they are doing. I read through the setup instructions and was VERY skeptical of the 5 minute install claim but I had it up and running in 5 minutes! I think I had never paid attention to Wordpress because it is a PHP/MySQL solution. I was a Microsoft ASP developer for 5 years and never played around with PHP so it was never on my radar.
After getting the base install up and running I added on a few other helpful plugins like Google Analytics and Akismet. The neat thing about Wordpress is that there is such a great development community to extend and customize the application. I am going to have to break open the code and learn PHP so I can do some customizations. So far I am super impressed!
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