Posted on April 21, 2008 @ 4:09 pm
I transferred my entire site from GoDaddy to Dreamhost yesterday. It was incredibly easy. I uploaded my files, imported my database, and changed a few configuration settings. My site loads noticeably faster now.
Now I want to switch from Textpattern to Wordpress. This is going to be a bit trickier, but hopefully I can find a way to do it.
Posted on April 18, 2008 @ 11:51 am
I’ve gotten fed up with my hosting package at GoDaddy after experiencing continual latency loading my site. While GoDaddy’s hosting may not be great, I do like them for managing my domains. So last week I transfered philtered from Register.com to GoDaddy. The transfer is supposed to be completed sometime today.
I looked at a number of companies for hosting, including Pair Networks Media Temple and Dreamhost I decided to go with Dreamhost, as they seem to offer the best package for the best price. $7/month for hosting with shell access seems pretty solid.
Since I’m going to have to transfer my site to Dreamhost, I’ve also started looking into whether I should upgrade my blog software. I have had Textpattern for a while and realize that it’s quite ancient compared to a lot of the other providers, such as WordPress Movable Type and Typepad WordPress seems to offer a lot of great plugins, so I am going to install that on Dreamhost and play around with it. Then comes the hard part – transferring my blog without losing my websearch ranking.
Google recently published a set of best practices for moving your site which is helpful. But moving from Textpattern to WordPress is going to be difficult, especially if I want to keep the same urls. I may just have to reload the content and get my site reindexed.
Alex Brie has a great description on how he imported textpattern into wordress but from the the comments, it sounds like it doesn’t work that well for everyone. I’m going to give it a shot this weekend.
Posted on April 8, 2008 @ 3:12 pm
One blog I enjoy reading regularly is AVC I enjoy how Fred intersperses his business and personal interests in his posts. A recent post from Fred that caught my attention on his site highlighted a Semantic web tutorial on ReadWriteWeb another one of my regular reads. Alex Iskold does a good job describing the basic technologies people are using for Semantic applications. As someone who works very closely with publishers, I’ve spent a significant amount of time encouraging companies to provide metadata with their content, so we can better index/rank their articles. I’ve recognized a number of roadblocks that have prevented widespread adoption of these semantic technologies (what many people have started to call web 3.0), including a lack of standards, a lack of adherence to proposed standards, and a lack of interest/use/understanding in general.
Semantic applications will benefit from a universal set of standards for identifying and recognizing semantic information, but the lack of a clearly defined standard has prevented ubiquitous adoption. Alex Iskold highlights a number of competing systems, including RDF and good old meta headers. Meta headers have been around forever but haven’t receveived as much use as they should have.
Another barrier is the fact that publishers don’t often notice the benefits and value-add from including semantic data in webapps because it hasn’t had an impact on their bottom line yet. The reason for this is because Google is generally good-enough for most types of queries, and those apps looking to be the next big thing by leveraging semantic data are going to find it very hard to differentiate their service and demonstrate their real value proposition if they aren’t very good at web-search and automatic identification/extraction of data (unless it’s a complementary service/feature).
Lastly, the apps on the web today don’t automatically generate/disseminate semantic data, so it’s hard to get widespread use. TechCrunch writes about this topic from time to time, but it has yet to implement semantics in their site (unless they are only showing them to webcrawlers). Sure, you might argue that blogs aren’t the best example (because RSS feeds provide some structured data), and you can call me a hypocrite because I don’t have that data in my blog either. However, I work very closely with a number of large commercial academic, scientific, and news publishers who are also slow and/or reluctant to provide detailed metadata about their articles. Some publishers even think that people should pay a fee to access their metadata! It will only be a matter of time before these publishers come around to find that is a close-minded approach which reduces their overall visibility. If you don’t make your content and metadata available online, soon you’ll be finding yourself left out of the conversation and playing catchup with everyone else.