For months, I’ve subjected my lovely wife to countless hours of MSNBC, CNN, and The Daily Show. Like an addict, I jones for the latest political news from the moment I wake up, and have even had political nightmares, waking up in a cold sweat.

If you haven’t voted, and you’re here in America, tomorrow’s the big day, so get off your duff and exercise your rights, dang it.

Not sure what I’ll do once the election’s over, but in the meantime, I’ll post a geeky widget because, well, that’s what geek news junkies do, right? [widget removed 11/06 - see MSNBC for full details]

Final Electoral Results: Barack Obama 364/173 John McCain

P.S. Watch Rachel Maddow. She’s darling, goofy, and wicked smart.

P.S.S. If you’re having trouble deciding who you should vote for, I believe the correct answer is Barack Obama!

I had several goals for the redesign including:

1. overhauling the imagery to better represent me and the site ‘brand’
2. making the site easier to read by using larger/more attractive fonts and better spacing
3. using an elastic layout that works better with different monitor resolutions, and
4. incorporate some new features like the last.fm links in the footer (more to come).

You might ask, “What the heck does ‘sewmyheadon’ have to do with web design, Linux, Open Source, and WordPress?”  Then again, you may not.

If you get a chance, please click around, let me know what you think, and if you encounter any errors.

I’m guessing DreamHost’s downtime issues are due to gross overselling of their servers. I’m certainly not against overselling within reason, but the hosting specs they offer are simply outrageous: 50 GB Storage and 5 TB bandwidth on a shared hosting account just to start.

It’s a heck of a deal for the money, but not worth the downtime for any site that’s important.

Over the last year, one account had:
45 outages totaling 15h 9m 56s of downtime, which amounts to 99.82% uptime

And our other account had a whopping:
115 outages totaling 1d 23h 15m 16s of downtime, amounting to 99.43% uptime.

I contacted DreamHost about the outages and they offered to move us to different servers and confirmed:

“unfortunately you’re right in that we don’t make any uptime guarantees”

(insert shameless plug)

I’m proud to say that at IvyCat hosting servers have had an average uptime of 99.998% in the same time frame.

Sure, you don’t get near as much storage or bandwidth, but you get solid, reliable, personalized hosting, backed by an uptime guarantee. That’s important to me and my customers.

View the video without the annoying transparency.

Cartoony Me

Last weekend at WordCamp 2007, I met Dr. David Klein from San Diego Chiropractic, who had a very creative and entertaining idea for attracting visitors and links to his website.

The kind Dr. Klein ran around between sessions for two days snapping pictures of WordCamp attendees after having each person hold up a large pad of paper on which they’d written:

• the URL of their website
• if they could be anything, what they’d like to be for a day

Then he took these photos and made caricatures of each.

This awesome idea works because it’s:

• creative – unique fusion of blogging and artistic talent
• effective – appeals to a blogger’s vane desire see more of themselves on the web
• smart – has the potential to create tons of incoming links when bloggers link to their own, or friend’s, pictures
• viral – once word got out what he was up to, people lined up to take part in the fun.

So, big kudos to Dr. Klein for coming up with a unique marketing strategy while helping make WordCamp 2007 even more fun.

Beware: here’s my picture, followed by the caricature.

• My Photo
• My Caricature

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Sounds like Lucky Charms, no?

If your hosting environment runs the Apache web server, you can simply create an .htaccess file in the directory you’d like to protect and insert the following code:

Options -Indexes

For example, say you’ve created a sub-folder on your site to hold images. Without protection, a user could visit http://yoursite.com/images/ and see a directory listing of the files and folders in the images directory.

By simply creating a file with the above line and saving it as .htaccess in the images directory, users will get an error rather than a directory listing when they visit the URL.

For more info on .htaccess, visit the Apache website.

technorati tags:.htaccess, Apache

Web 2.0 Browser?

Flock is built on the open source Mozilla Firefox code base, which is a great start. It’s very standards-compliant and stable from the get-go. Why didn’t Microsoft think of that?

The folks at Flock have taken the browser in a little different, Web 2.0 direction.

First, they gave the browser a bit of a facelift. Although the basic design is still somewhat Firefox-ian, new functions are incorporated and old ones have had an overhaul to accomodate some of the ways some people are using browsers today.

“a heavy emphasis on the photo experience (from upload through discovery to notification), RSS support, dramatic improvements to the search box (including a new take on favorites), and blogging.”
Introducing Flock Beta 1

Sure, you can do some of this stuff in Firefox with a few added extensions, but Flock has put it all together in one slim package.

Some of my favorite features:

• connect to a Flickr account to upload, share, manage and conveniently use pics on the web.
• connect to your del.ico.us account to share and manage bookmarks
• connect to several popular blogging and content management platforms like WordPress, Drupal, Moveable Type, Typepad, LiveJournal, and Blogger.
• built-in post editor lets you create and save blog/CMS content locally and post directly when ready.
• the photobar lets you drag and drop photos into your blog or CMS posts.
• snippets feature allows you to collect web content, and will automatically insert the appropriate <cite> tags with links.
• built-in RSS reader is a great improvement over the standard Firefox live bookmarks.

So, I’m going to keep using Flock because it’s fun and helpful, even though I can’t see divorcing Firefox as my browser of choice.

If you want to learn more:

• Check out the Flock site.
• There’s a good interview with Chris Messina, formerly of Flock, on episode 5 of the Web 2.0 Show.
• Other podcast appearances from Flockstars listed in Will Pate’s post.

technorati tags:flock, browser, blog, cms, flockbrowser

This may sound silly, but you’d be surprised how many website owners have no idea where their domain is registered and who really controls it.

Who is the Master of Your Domain?

If you have a website and own a domain name make sure you:

• Know where your domain is registered
• Are listed as the Administrative Contact on the domain
• Have current contact information listed with the registrar so you’re notified of billing and expiration issues
• Get a username and password to login and manage your account

Why is this Important?

If you own the domain you should be able to:

• Transfer your web hosting
• Change domain ownership
• Update domain contact information
• Renew and extend your domain registration

How to Find Domain Information

Most registrars offer an easy way to lookup whois information, but the one that I use most often is: Whois Source.

Domain Horror Stories

Curse of the Expiring Domain

One of my customers registered their business domain through a host that didn’t monitor its expiration. Due to an oversight, the domain expired and was snapped up in minutes by a guy in China that offered to sell it back for several thousand dollars.

This poor, frustrated customer registered another name and moved her entire site to the new domain.

Aside from the obvious hassle of moving and setting up email accounts, the search engine traffic, and customer ramifications take a long time to recover from.

They even had to reprint all of their letterhead, brochures, etc. Argh!

Webmaster/Owner

Another customer registered their domain through a web designer, who registered it through the host he was using at the time. The domain was left in the designer’s name, meaning that he was the Administrative Contact on the whois record.

The web designer lost the login info to manage the domain and the original hosting company was gobbled up by another company that “didn’t have any access to domain management. ” So, changing the ownership or nameserver records was a frustrating, finger-pointing mess.

We were left with two possibilities:

1. The designer (Admin Contact) could write to the registrar on company letterhead proving ownership of the domain so the login could be reset. Who knows how long this would have taken.
2. Transfer the domain to another registrar where the customer could manage the domain.

We ended up tranferring the domain and the designer cooperated by forwarding the confirmation email to the customer so they could confirm the transfer. Since most domain transfers take 5 – 7 days to complete, we’re still in limbo until it goes through, but they’ll soon have control.

The Wrap

Do yourself a huge favor and make sure you are the master of your domain name. It may take a few minutes now, but it can save tons of time, and possibly money down the road.