Internet

Drupal 7 Released - The World's Best Content Management System

January 05, 2011

Today, January 5, Drupal version 7.0 was released (download Drupal here). Drupal 7 release parties will be held worldwide on January 7 (which also happens to be my birthday - yay!).

Congratulations to the team of almost 1,000 developers who helped make Drupal 7 a reality, and congratulations to Dries Buytaert, the founder of Drupal, and webchick, the person who shepherded (and continues herding) the community as the Drupal 7 core maintainer!

This website is still running on Drupal 6, but I'm slowly beginning the process of redesigning and upgrading the rest of my sites (notably, so far, Midwestern Mac, LLC) to Drupal 7. The Archdiocesan website and St. Louis Review will take a bit longer, since there's a lot of custom code that needs to be refactored.

If you run a website, have you checked out Drupal before? It's a lot more extensible (in my experience) than Joomla or Wordpress, the two other top contenders. If it's good enough for large sites like the White House and Examiner.com, it's good enough for you ;-)

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St. Louis Area Internet Provider Review: Charter Cable, AT&T DSL, Clear Wireless

Charter, AT&T and Clear - Logos

For the past eight years, I've been bouncing back and forth from one ISP to another, trying to find one that actually feels worth the load of money I pay for it.

I've used a variety of services from both of the main St. Louis area providers (AT&T and Charter Communications), and am testing Clear wireless (a new game in town, but one that's been around in Chicago and other larger cities for a year or more). I've paid anywhere from $15/month to $90/month (for Internet service alone—I've never participated in the 'Charter Bundle,' 'Uverse' or any voice/data/video bundles).

I'm going to go through the reasons why I've tried all the different services, and what I've liked—and hated—about each. As a prelude, I am still not pleased with the performance I've received from any of the providers (at least, not for what I'm paying/have paid!).

AT&T 'High Speed' DSL

I've tried AT&T's DSL service in three different parts of St. Louis: North county, the Central West End, and Shrewsbury. In all three areas, I've encountered the same problem—an unreliable connection.

I've been through many support calls, and in all cases, when a technician is sent out, he says the line signal is perfect. Go figure. I've used a few different modems, some rather expensive, and they've all exhibited these problems.

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Warriors of the Net - IP for Peace [Funny Networking Video]

September 23, 2010

Click here to begin your journey into "the net:"

Some quotables:

"Mister IP packages, labels, and sends packages of information [to your computer]."
"AppleTalk packets—they're going against traffic, as usual."
"Ah, the router—a symbol of control in a seemingly unorganized world."
"The router switch plays fast and loose with IP packets—a digital pinball wizard, if you will."
"Out here [on the Internet], it's the wild west [...] you never know when you'll meet the dreaded ping of death."
"The firewall can be a bastion of security, or a dreaded adversary."
"Pleased with their efforts, and trusting in a better world, our trusty data packets ride off blissfully into the sunset of another day, knowing fully, they have served their masters well. Now isn't that a happy ending?"

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Bad / Annoying IP Addresses

From time to time, there is a very disobedient/annoying computer or set of computers that annoy the heck out of me online—usually by attempting to bring down one of my websites, or by trying to access hundreds of vulnerable locations (which makes my server return a bunch of 404s) on my server.

For information on different IPs, I use the online IP information lookup tool at robtex.

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This is Why SEO is Important, I Guess...

February 12, 2010

After reading this comment thread about Facebook logins on ReadWriteWeb, I feel sad to call myself a Facebook user. The sheer number of clueless users who actually thought ReadWriteWeb was Facebook is a sad fact. The fact that they login to facebook by going to Google and typing in "Facebook Login" is also sad. Could they not simply type in facebook.com? I guess the idea of a URL is too outlandish for people.

What about a bookmark? My grandma, who only does a few things on the web, knows how to make a bookmark and go back to it. A lot of the Facebook users who posted comments looked quite a bit younger than my grandma, and, apparently, they cannot figure out things she could do in her sleep!

The takeaway? SEO counts. If someone types in "Best Hardware Store in St. Louis," it seems likely they'll believe whatever Google gives as the first result. It's pretty easy to target these kinds of searches... and I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

P.S. Farmville. Ugh!

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