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And we’re back. Almost.

By on April 1, 2011 | Category: Article

So, after almost two weeks of downtime, BLHill.net: More From Less is back up.

A while back, I wanted to simplify my web hosting administration. I learned that version 3.0 of the WordPress software incorporated a feature that allows one to run multiple blogs/sites from a single installation. This meant that I could run one copy of WordPress off of a single database, which translates to less management. (Sort of fits in with the whole idea of More From Less…) The WordPress software and all the various themes and plugins are regularly updated, so keeping software up to date (and therefore secure) can be a real pain with multiple websites. When version 3.0 came out, I set up a new hosting account over at GoDaddy.com, and proceeded to configure a multi-site installation of WordPress.

I chose GoDaddy’s grid hosting service because the promises seemed too good to pass up. For less than $10 a month I could run a cluster of sites all under one administrative interface. Too good to be true proved to be the case. After about 8 months on the grid hosting account, I can attest to the fact that GoDaddy is overselling the product. Too many sites are hosted on each grid cluster, resulting in serious delays and a lack of responsiveness when visiting one of my sites. I used a variety of caching tools that are designed to improve performance, but to no avail. When I was logged into the administrative interface, it took forever for pages to refresh.

Now, I am very much aware of the bad publicity that GoDaddy generates. The advertising is crass/tacky at best, and exploitative at worst. And then there’s Bob. Oh boy. His latest stunt, posting a video of himself killing an elephant, is just about the worst PR I can imagine. (Did it have to be an elephant?) I still am a customer of GoDaddy – they are a great domain name registrar. But the grid hosting service stinks.

After years of hearing about how all the cool kids were using mediatemple.net for web hosting, I decided to give them a try. I am using their grid hosting service and so far, it seems to be working like a charm. Grid hosting is an interesting concept in itself. Basically, resources for webhosting and databases are spread across numerous servers on an as needed basis. So if there is a big spike in resource usage, more machines are made available. I can’t explain how it works, but I get the idea.

So we’ll see how it goes. I’m planning to continue to improve the infrastructure of this site and the others I manage. Right now, BLHill.net is the first of my sites to go live again. Hopefully over the weekend I’ll be able to get AEC Forensics back up, as well as SpaceElephants.com. I’m also going to be introducing a new website next week, ProSvcMktg.com, which will feature links to articles pertaining to marketing professional services. SpaceElephants.com will focus more on technology, and AEC Forensics will continue to feature news and articles relevant to construction consulting, construction law and building science.

As for this site, More From Less, I’m going to try to post at least once each weekday. Sometimes it may just be a sentence or two with a link to something I find interesting. Other times I’ll have longer posts such as this, exploring topics in greater detail. Thanks for hanging in there with me, and if you haven’t done so already, sign up for the free newsletter, or follow me on Twitter (@BLHill).

More announcements to come. Thanks again for taking the time to read this, and please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions or comments.

Oh, and as Steve Jobs is fond of saying, one more thing… If you are reading this by email or in an RSS reader, make sure to drop by the actual site. I have joined Woo Themes as a developer member. Their themes are spectacular and I am using their Canvas theme to power this site. I think it looks pretty neat. What do you think?


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Blogging Is Dead. Long Live Blogging.

By on February 23, 2011 | Category: Article

Matt Mullenweg is the founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress – arguably one of the most popular blogging platforms, and my own personal preference. Mullenweg has been blogging longer than most and weighed in on an article published recently in the New York Times that suggests blogging is being replaced by Facebook, Twitter and other services:

The New York Times has a pretty prominent article today called Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter. The title was probably written by an editor, not the author, because as soon as the article gets past the two token teenagers who tumble and Facebook instead of blogging, the stats show all the major blogging services growing — even Blogger whose global “unique visitors rose 9 percent, to 323 million,” meaning it grew about 6 Foursquares last year alone. (In the same timeframe WordPress.com grew about 80 million uniques according to Quantcast.)

As Mullenweg points out, the actual text of the article seems to diverge from the headline. Here is my two cents: Facebook is great for keeping in touch with friends and family. Twitter is an excellent short-messaging service for keeping up with what is happening. LinkedIn is great for keeping in touch with professional contacts. By a large margin, the vast majority of messages that catch my attention on these services includes links to articles and blog posts. In other words, these services are great for getting the message out, but for the real “meat and potatoes” of an idea or piece of news, longer-form articles are irreplaceable.

I view Twitter, Facebook and other social messaging sites as a stream of headlines. But a headline is just a tease. I too saw the headline from the article above in the NYT, and had a similar reaction as Mullenweg. Thus, the old cliche is still true – you can’t judge a book by its cover, nor can you judge an article by its headline.

Content is still king, in my book. While younger people may use social media similar to how most people used telegrams and postcards, that doesn’t negate the relevance of longer-form content. I know that my life and experience is much richer thanks to the advent of blogging. While I do enjoy writing and creating content myself, I gain much more from the content that others produce. For me, blogs are like the “eyes of the world.”

Update: TechCrunch blogger, MG Siegler, has offered his take on this subject as well.


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Announcement: AECForensics.com is the source for Architectural, Engineering and Construction News

By on July 26, 2010 | Category: Article

Below is a quote from the announcement at AECForensics.com:

After a lot of work behind the scenes, I’m proud to announce that AEC Forensics is now fully operational. I have scoured the internet and continue to do so daily, selecting and curating the content that appears here. Since no other website has risen to the challenge of compiling news about our industry (construction defect litigation, construction law, bad faith, green forensics, etc.), I have thrown my hat in the ring. Those of you that know me personally are aware that I am a full time employee and shareholder of KPA Associates, Inc., a San Diego-based architectural firm that provides expert witness testimony in construction defect matters, in addition to ADA compliance and residential/commercial/institutional design services. In other words, this website is an avocation for me and something I pursue solely because of my passion for this industry. Admittedly not everything you find on this site is strictly related to construction defect litigation. (Please visit the About page for a more thorough explanation.)

Let me explain a little bit more about why I’m doing this and how. First, this is truly a labor of love. I have been working in the AEC forensics field for over a decade, yet nobody has a decent run-down of relevant information about the industry. We in this industry are by nature, obsessed with information, but it almost seems as if there is an elitist approach to knowledge management in the construction defect realm. Plus a lot of people are understandably reluctant to openly publish their opinion for free when the person is billing north of $150 per hour for their opinion. Me? I’m no expert. I just work for one. Next, I want to discuss a little bit about how I am doing this. Most importantly, if it were not for WordPress (specifically version 3.0), none of this would be feasible within the limited amount of time I have. I have spent years developing a workflow that works for me with regard to reviewing, analyzing, categorizing, publishing and distributing information from online sources. At the heart of it all is Google Reader. Using the tagging functions, I’m able to quickly review, annotate and categorize articles from thousands of sources. The tagged items are then fed through various plugins as drafts in WordPress. I manually edit each post one at a time before publishing. From there, Hootsuite and some other tools distribute the content through various channels. What is important is that I have culled thousands of posts daily to find the truly noteworthy articles (in my opinion) that pertain to the topics I’m interested in. In a way, I’m trying to keep true to the original notions of blogging – as in weblog, or a log chronicling web-based publications of interest. That’s all I’ve got for now. Time for dinner and some more time with the family…


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WordPress 3.0: Thelonious

By on July 19, 2010 | Category: Article

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Image by oddsock via Flickr

After a lot of wrangling of PHP, HTML, a tiny bit of JAVA, a little CSS, and redirecting some RSS, BLHill.net is now on a new server running the latest version of WordPress. WordPress 3.0 is a massive upgrade from the previous version. For me the most important part was merging of WPMU, or WordPress Multi-User, into the code base. This allowed me to set up one installation of WordPress to host all of my websites. I am only running a few sites right now, but plan to add more. Some people are running thousands of sites using a single WordPress installation including WordPress.com, which hosts over 100,000 blogs.

Now let’s talk about whom this release is named after – Thelonious Monk. Thelonious Sphere Monk was a jazz pianist. But saying Monk was just a jazz pianist is like saying Steve Wozniak is just a computer geek. Go learn more about Thelonious Monk, buy his music or find out about his son’s work. (Incidentally, when I played the Playboy© Jazz Festival at the Hollywood Bowl, T.S. Monk, opened for us…)

I’m hoping that the move to a grid hosting plan at GoDaddy, will result in quicker response and better stability for my sites. I’ve heard good things and am hoping that affordable hosting can in fact be reliable. I’ll be trying to post here more often, but much more will come from my newsletter, as well as on Twitter. I have a new site in the works and AEC Forensics . com will be updated soon with an amazing theme and a lot more content. Stay tuned… some geeky stuff: And as a postscript, I like to briefly mention a topic that has been getting a little heated: WordPress, the GPL and premium themes. I don’t know legally if a WordPress theme would be defined as derivative or not, thereby requiring adherence to the GPL. But, I have chosen instead to avoid the controversy by installing an amazing theme by Sayontan Sinha called Suffusion that is open source and mind-numbingly flexible. In fact, after hearing some of Matt Mullenweg’s opinions on the subject, as well as revisiting some of Cory Doctorow’s perspective, I’m seriously considering going completely open source, and ditching proprietary/closed-source software. We’ll see.


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More on FriendFeed, Facebook, etc.

By on August 20, 2009 | Category: Article

Update:

So that didn’t go well… Seems that Tumblr didn’t like importing feeds so I decided to investigate all the hoopla and jumped in with both feet to Posterous. I can thus control where and how I post all via email which also means that I can maintain an archive through gmail. Now all the random tidbits that I find during the course of the day will end up on stream.blhill.net.

Just when I was starting to feel pretty good about my flow of information and the organization/integration of that information, a wrench got thrown into the works. I was using the venerable FriendFeed as a means of aggregating all of my online activities. FriendFeed would pull in feeds from this blog, twitter, and various other sources. It seemed like an ideal situation, as I have enjoyed using FriendFeed as a means of perusing the aggregated content of others that I respect and follow.

And then this: FriendFeed was acquired by Facebook and will be integrated into the latter’s service. For me this is frustrating. I use Facebook solely as a means of interacting with actual friends and family – most of whom use Facebook as their sole online venue. I don’t want to try to add in the hundreds of people I follow on FriendFeed to Facebook – Facebook’s interface is just not very conducive for me to stay abreast of the goings on in tech and the architecture/engineering/construction/legal real-time web.

As far as aggregating my own content, I’ve set up a stream via Tumblr that will pull in everything I do. Many of those items from that stream will also make their way to my Twitter account. I have the option of cross-posting to my Facebook status and Twitter using a variety of tools, but I don’t want to saturate Facebook with the dozens of links I come across on a regular basis – as I stated above, Facebook just isn’t the right tool for managing a large stream of information. What about FriendFeed? For now, I’m going to keep using it. Using the grouping features combined with real-time search makes it easy for me to hone in on various topics. But I am going to do away with it eventually. I have been using the excellent Seesmic Desktop app for managing twitter and Facebook updates, but I really need to spend some time grouping the people I follow to aid in managing that flow of information.

Sorry FriendFeed. You guys made a great product that I have used almost daily for many months now. But I don’t want to have to integrate with Facebook. I’m not saying that I won’t derive value from this acquisition in the future, but it isn’t what I’m looking for right now.


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