On Email Organization
April 22, 2008 by Jonathan · 1 Comment
For the last month or so I’ve been on a rampage, an email rampage. I haven’t quite hit Inbox Zero but inbox 30-40 suits me well actually. Here’s what I’ve done:
- I now have only 2 visible email addresses, Gmail and my @jonathancoffman.com mail. Those other addresses (.Mac, Yahoo!, Mizzou, and my secondary Gmail) all now get picked up by my primary Gmail account, this way I only have two inboxes to check, and hopefully by responding to those with only one address I gradually get fewer and fewer messages going to those other addys.
- Combining the last two addresses, my primary gmail and my domain email isn’t yet feasible. I can’t quite take myself down to that level yet. Because they’re used for two very different purposes (personal and professional) the use cases will remain mutually exclusive for the time being.
- The downside to still having two inboxes: two sets of gmail tags/folders. My domain email is handled by GoogleApps (which I love by the way), so for now I have two identical but disconnected sets of tags.
- Account and Login Information
- Banking
- Bills
- Blog Conversations
- Contributr
- Current Projects
- Pipeline Projects
- Coupons and Discounts
- Job Hunting
- Journalism School
- Newsletters
- Personal (family)
- Private Betas
- Product Orders
- Service Orders
- Require followup
- Servers and Hosting
- Social Media
- Travel
- URGENT
Jonathan’s Twitter Updates for 2008-03-18
March 18, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- Good Morning Twitterville, it’s still raining here and it’s kinda depressing. #
- I really like the new Safari "Develop" menu for quick switching between user-agents, etc. #
- I am now Twittering using Ping.fm! #
- Hello World! This is my first post from Ping.fm, I’m testing out their service this morning. #
- Time for my post-lunch laptop battery recharge period… it’s also nice to turn up the screen brightness to high #
- @HighTechDad I like it, and I tend to think of "grid" as being a much better term than "cloud". Although I find myself using both. #
- Ping.fm is pretty neat, but can it beat "Moodlbast" which I’ve used for quite some time, watch for a blog post later
# - @HighTechDad Just a little, launched a couple servers, logged in, haven’t done any configuring or file loading yet. #
- Top News Headline of the day: "Ambulance Hits Heard Of Dear" - grammar errors theirs, I LOLd 4real on when it hit my feed reader. #
- Using the Reynold’s Institute’s money to register for NAB in Las Vegas in April, and I’ve got an interview setup in Las Vegas that same week #
- Just finished dinner, I’ve got some server migrations/upgrades/ordering to do tonight for Contributr #
What it Felt Like to Have No Blog for 8 Days | chrisbrogan.com
March 15, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
What it Felt Like to Have No Blog for 8 Days | chrisbrogan.com: “”
I just thought I’d take a moment to let the people who follow my own blog know that fellow blogger and personal-branding and social media guru Chris Brogan is back online after 8 crazy nights of having no blog.
I think Chris handled the situation very well, he certainly had a lot of support from all of his tech-centric followers. I’m just glad to have him back up and running.
In no way was he out of touch with his community while his site was on hiatus. Chris kept on Tweeting away, and wrote a couple of times on his Tumblog which he mapped over to his own site.
It figures of course that something as major as having your site fail on you happens when you’re in the middle of conference season and with SxSW where I’m sure Chris was a big hit.
This incident just goes to show you however that keeping and maintaining backups of your data is VERY important. Especially when you have as much content floating around on the web as Chris does.
Jonathan’s Twitter Updates for 2008-03-11
March 11, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- Alright, productivity is low right now, so I’ll watch some TV for a while this evening. #
- Good Morning Twitterville! #
- Headed off to work, Tweet ya later! #
- I’m in the Journalism School Lounge if you need me #
- @adarowski no kidding! it’s like I can stop squinting again after I open ‘real safari’ #
- I’m doing some server optimizations, am I a sysadmin? nope, but I dabble! #
- Reading through some of the great feedback I’m getting on Contributr #
- Playing with the GoGrid beta, deploying two servers as I type. http://www.gogrid.com #
Pie In The Sky - Where Mosso Has it Right and Wrong
February 20, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
Where Mosso’s The Hosting Cloud Wins and Looses
Mosso’s The Hosting Cloud promises to offer all of the stability, uptime, and processing power of competing grid/cluster products without the management headache.
This is in distinct contrast to Amazon’s cloud computing services, they provide the machines and that’s about it. It’s up to the user to provide the OS, applications, support, and management of the servers.
Mosso has it right, and if cloud and utility computing is going to catch on, it needs to appeal to the masses. Appealing to the masses at this point on the Internet largely means usability. If it’s not highly usable to the target demographic you might as well wait to launch.
From what I’ve seen of the Mosso Hosting Cloud control panel, they’ve taken great care to make sure it’s easily used and implemented by anyone who’s used shared web hosting previously.
Some of the key problems of utility computing remain however and it’s a testament not just to how far we are from truly ubiquitous cloud computing. Web platforms weren’t designed from the ground-up to be highly scaleable. Which is unfortunate, but changing.
One of the biggest problems I see in the near-term is Ruby and Rails, while it will scale gracefully (look at Twitter for instance), it took a lot of work and dedicated resources to make it do so.
Mosso has decided to continue using LightSpeed as the service to handle RoR on their cloud, which being a commercial product is largely proprietary and not the end all of solutions.
The only other area that I would have liked to have seen additional improvement is the higher cost of entry into Mosso’s system. At $99 it stands toward top of list in terms of shared hosting, granted this is much better than any shared host you’ll find anywhere, but the fact still stands that at $99 you’ve got a whole new set of competitors than at MediaTemple’s $20 entry point.
For $99 in the hosting industry you can get a pretty powerful VPS, a very low-end dedicated server, or multiple shared hosting accounts. Of course the argument Mosso has is that for that $99 you’re in theory getting multiple (potentially dozens+) VPS style systems for your dollar.
Scaling up from that $99 is where Mosso is at an even greater advantage, their ‘overage’ charges are on the lower end of the line than other grid/cluster hosting platforms.
So while Mosso’s Hosting Cloud is a big step in the right direction, there are numerous additional problems that need to be solved before my dream of utility/cloud computing really comes true.
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Pie In The Sky is a weeklong blog series by Jonathan Coffman - Convergence Journalism Specialist and New-Media Evangelist examining the state of the web hosting business and the potential for cloud computing. Visit Jonathan’s blog all week for expert commentary, insight, and vision.
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Pie In The Sky - Mosso’s Hosting Cloud Launches
February 19, 2008 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about what I thought “The Cloud” should look like, well my dream may just be coming true! A couple days after the post I was contacted by Mosso, which is the grid hosting component of RackSpace.
Mosso is releasing a new service that promises to have the stability and security of Amazon’s EC2 and S3 cloud service, with the ease of use and support of a managed hosting environment.
I spoke with Mosso co-founder Jonathan Bryce last week about the possibilities and the plans and what follows is what he had to say.
Basically, Mosso has worked over the last few months to shore up issues and enhance the features available to their customers. The ‘Hosting Cloud’ as they are now calling it is the end-result of that work, with a new emphasis on billing for actual usage.
Mosso currently supports over 37,000 web applications on their cluster, so they’ve got some experience in enterprise scaling. Right now cloud computing is dominated by Amazon’s services, but what Mosso has done is take the power of the cloud and simplified its use, allowing customers to use standard web development tools and transports to build and update their web sites and applications.
One area that Amazon has taken a hit is their lack of control panel and controls in general, there are a couple companies who having created business around providing management for EC2/S3 controls, but Mosso has wrapped up everything you need into a familiar looking dashboard control panel environment.
In just a few clicks, and in 5 minutes you can setup a new web application on their grid selecting from Windows/Linux, PHP, MySQL and other technologies. Your application is then created on the SAN and virtualized to several servers to begin with. It’s then ready to be virtualized onto additional servers on the fly as demand and load increases.
Mosso has always been setup with the reseller in mind, and their new focus on The Cloud doesn’t change that, customers are still allowed an unlimited number of applications and databases and 3rd party billing support.
The pricing and marketing is where The Hosting Cloud really changes the business, they’re keeping the current $99 per month hosting fee, but dropping the overage charges to much more reasonable levels.
For your $99 a month you get 3 million requests, in and out. If you go over that, there’s where the power of the cloud kicks in, addition requests are only 3 cents per thousand (a very reasonable amount).
In addition to processing power, SAN storage space and bandwidth are also included in the base fee with low overage fees (25 cents per GB over your allocation of bandwidth, and 50 cents per GB of SAN space).
I’ll be back tomorrow with more thoughts on Mosso’s announcement and I’ll share some links to other posts about the launch from the blogosphere.
–Pie In The Sky is a weeklong blog series by Jonathan Coffman - Convergence Journalism Specialist and New-Media Evangelist examining the state of the web hosting business and the potential for cloud computing. Visit Jonathan’s blog all week for expert commentary, insight, and vision.–
Pie In The Sky - Where We Are Now
February 18, 2008 by Jonathan · 1 Comment
Where We Are Now
The pulse of the Internet is in a constant flux and we in the new and social media fields are no different. As the first post in my Pie In The Sky series I thought I’d provide you with some links and resources to get familiar with the latest advances and information having to do with web hosting.
While we can talk about Cloud computing, grid hosting, etc, the foundation of the Internet is being threatened right now by what’s called Net Neutrality. Now I have my opinions and ideas about it, but I don’t feel confident enough in my own knowledge so I give you some links to learn more. And you DO need to learn more about Net Neutrality
- Wikipedia Net Neutrality Page and US Network Neutrality
- Save The Internet: fighting for Internet Freedom
Of course the topic of the Pie In The Sky series is cloud computing/hosting. Here’s some quick links to more information about cloud hosting:
- An Outline of how Cloud Computing Should Work - (by Jonathan Coffman)
- Wikipedia entry on Cloud Computing
Cloud or Utility computing is still in its infancy at this point but all signs lead to heavy adoption in the coming years. The technology behind stringing a bunch of servers together to share the load of processing billions of web pages at the same time keeps getting better, more reliable, and less expensive.
Perhaps the biggest success story of them all when it comes to cloud hosting is Google, they use tens (hundreds?) of thousands of commodity web servers to serve up the most popular site on the web to people of every country.
While many would love to hear Google offer such a service (and they may), we do have a few options right now. In fact, this site is hosted by MediaTemple on their (gs) GridService platform. It works quite well actually, my site is stored in a large Storage Area Network device and lots of servers have access to it at any given time. This allows my site to remain live and speedy in the event of a flood of readers coming all at once.
I’ll look at more of these services in the coming week but here are the major cloud/utility hosting providers right now:
- Amazon EC2/S3 is perhaps the most widely known and popular, they have fully adopted the utility computing but face problems with availability, speed, and a general lack of usability by all but the most experienced web developers.
- MediaTemple is the least expensive provider I’ve encountered and they provide a great grid hosting service.
- 3Tera offers enterprise level application hosting across a grid of servers.
- SoftLayer while not a ‘grid’ or ‘cloud’ hosting provider does offer many dedicated server options and load balancers so you could create your own Pie In the Sky. I’ve had servers with them in the past and they are my all-time favorite hosting company.
- ServePath offers grids of servers although I have no experience with them.
- Concentric also offers load balanced clustered servers for cloud computing
Stay tuned throughout the week for my blog series Pie In The Sky - Cloud Computing and the future of web hosting!
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Pie In The Sky is a weeklong blog series by Jonathan Coffman - Convergence Journalism Specialist and New-Media Evangelist examining the state of the web hosting business and the potential for cloud computing. Visit Jonathan’s blog all week for expert commentary, insight, and vision.
–
An Outline of How Cloud Computing Should Work
February 12, 2008 by Jonathan · 2 Comments
I do a lot of investigating and research on web hosting, it’s always been a business that interests me and the economics of the industry are very dynamic as well. Let’s just say that the entrepreneur in me has been ‘planning’ the best web host out there and you know what, it’s all about cloud computing now, we need ubiquitous web application servers now.
So here’s what I think the ideal cloud computing web host looks like:
- Large amount of on-demand storage, I’d like to not only host my files and my web sites and applications, but also keep backups of my personal files in the pie in the sky. I do want to pay for that space, I know that unlimited storage is certainly not unlimited, the market says that just cannot be so.
- Fast, speed is really what counts here. I need to be able to tell that my site is up, running, and extremely fast. A lot of this is up to me to develop sites that are light weight and use resources efficiently…. but let’s just check and double check that the hardware and pipes connected to that hardware isn’t what’s slowing the web down.
- Standards Based, I’m not saying software should be free, but the ability of open source software to evolve and change, and be enhanced is just too powerful to ignore.
- Easy to use control panel. I currently use several Media Temple servers to host various web projects and am very happy with them. One the reasons for that is that their control panel is very easy to use yet provides enough control to keep experienced developers happy.
- Transfers to and from the service need to be simplified. This is where Amazon has lost out, they only support a limited number of transfer methods. For cloud computing to truly catch on and be powerful enough for us all to tap into it needs to operate like a ‘normal’ web host or server does. Simple FTP, SFTP, and SSH access is a necessity. Without that, you loose the ability to signup young, inexperienced developers, and you loose the ability for peaceful migrations from other platforms.
I believe that these things are possible, and the technology is largely here already (look at the major Content Delivery Networks). And the final thing that needs to be worked out for cloud computer? The Pricing. It’s an entirely new way to bill and invoice customers, only charging for what they need.
However, I would also offer standard plans similar to what we have in the industry now. You get X amount of space and X amount of cpu time for $Y per month. There is definitely something to say about knowing exactly what you’re going to pay each month for hosting.
Jonathan’s Twitter Updates for 2007-12-04
December 4, 2007 by Jonathan · Leave a Comment
- Fixing dinner, pepper-jack stuffed chicken breast with steamed broccoli and long-grain rice (cooked the real way, no instant stuff here!?) #
- Just finished dinner, and I’ve got enough left-overs for lunch and dinner tomorrow! #
- Watching Chuck on NBC tonight, it’s kinda exciting #
- WTF mates, negotiate with the writers, they just said ‘Chuck will be back after the 1st of the year… we hope…" jerks #
- I want online TV, and I want new episodes, what’s it gonna take to make that happen? #
- @chrisbaskind where’d you hear all that? I love (mt)! #
- @chrisbaskind I agree, some problems here lately but I’ve stuck through it. #
- Database work, then the big international video conference at 9:30 #
- @newmediajim Coffee and Twitter in the morning is a wonderful thing! #
- Converting some PDFs to text to a database #
- Getting all of the connections ready for my 5-nation video conference this morning. #
- Poland has joined us, now we’re waiting for Russia, Argentina, and the UK I believe #
- Our colleagues in Moscow have now joined in, we’re expecting about 30 observers here in the room, and each country has around 5 people #
- Our meeting is over, it went very well, check out the video archive: http://urltea.com/2a6n #
- This Adobe technology is amazing, we now can transcend timezones and continents very easily #
- Finishing closing out this meeting then heading to lunch #
- Well, Acrobat Connect is slightly more expensive than I’ve been pitching, but it is a steal considering what we can accomplish with it #
- Working on a campaign finance database. #
CaspioVote - Turnkey Election Guide - A Review
November 14, 2007 by Jonathan · 2 Comments
CaspioVote is being marketed as an easy-to-use election guide type drill-down, database driven tool for media companies to plug-in to their sites and have an insta-election guide.
I’ve read all pages of the site related to this particular application, and visited the only live client page I was able to find through their press release and have given my opinions, good and bad about the information that’s currently available on this just-released system.
Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:
Pros:
- It’s turnkey, pay the money and it’s an instant election guide
- No coding or other knowledge needed other than sticking a a code-snippit into your existing site
- Relatively inexpensive, which it typically the case with turnkey solutions.
- No additional staffing needed
Cons:
- It’s turnkey, this means you have little control because all the work has been done for you.
- It’s does not appear to be search engine friendly, not having a URL hierarchy is going to limit if not exclude you from the free traffic that your news organization will get because of the lack of search engine friendliness.
- No additional staffing needed, this is a great solution when you’ve got a one or two person web crew in your newsrooms and neither of which is a database or web application developer.
Some other thoughts – Here the CaspioVote Features page and my response to those items, the Features page has the bulk of the public information about the application which is why I’ve concentrated on the details provided there.
- Fully-hosted and operated by Caspio, requiring no support from IT.
- They have control over your site, if their servers crash or the software breaks, you’ve got to wait for them to fix the issue, much like if you use GoogleDocs instead of MS Office, it’s great until Google’s servers go down for a few minutes and you haven’t saved what you’re working on. You’re completely at the mercy and experience of the Caspio staff and their datacenter (having not seen a license agreement for the application, is there an SLA to provide accountability and retribution for extended down-time?)
- Seamlessly integrates with your site.
- By seamless, they mean they give you a snippit of code that happens to be a javascript call to display the information, this method isn’t search engine friendly, and tends to have difficulties in cross-platform and cross-browser compatibility.
- Covers all race levels (local, county, state and federal) and ballot issues.
- This hierarchy should be easy enough for basic web users to understand and use. Does it provide enough flexibility for those who want more information and detail?
- Visitors see local election details and candidate profiles on your site and print their customized ballot
- Print their custom ballot as seen on the only live-site sample running this application is simply a button that prints the web page that they’re on, complete with the original site navigation, images, and the Caspio frame.
- No limits on the number of counties, state and federal districts, townships, parishes, municipalities, or school districts.
- Well I would hope there wouldn’t be!
- Unlimited page views included in the annual license.
- This is only important because each time someone visits your election guide, it’s really their website that’s coming up inside yours, frankly, it’s not unlimited, what they have is tiered pricing based on your market-size, having a bigger market means you’re likely to have more web views, which in fact makes the price higher. So yes it’s unlimited page views, but at the same time, you’re still paying more for your size. This does seem to be a fair way of pricing and is quite common when working with media companies.
- Mass-email feature to help you invite candidates to complete their profiles and answer your questions
- No interference with your advertising and analytics systems so you enjoy all the traffic and ad revenues.
- It seems like this could be problematic depending on how they have the site implemented within your own.
If I were an Internet person with a limited budget at a newsroom that wouldn’t otherwise have a very comprehensive election guide of information on their site without this application, then I would be very interested in what CaspioVote has to offer.
If a newsroom were to buy into the CaspioVote program, they are getting what appears to be a basic content manager of information directly related to a specific election. I’m basing my review on the only live example site available at the time of this posting.
Caspio provides a great entry into the very basic information that every news organization should have on the web anyway, however it is greatly restricted in functionality and usability because of the single- form of navigation and the limited information provided on each page as shown by the live site using the application. The literature available on the web says that they can implement extended functionality for a fee.
On the same front as usability and functionality, by looking at how the page loads and how the hierarchy is built, I would imagine that this setup would not be very ‘functional’ for those viewers who have disabilities and use software and other assistive devices.
For one, screen readers don’t always pick up on those java calls at all, I’m not an accessibility expert by any means, but I do hear complaints from people trying to use the web with assistive technologies and struggling so I’m curious to see what testing has been completed.
There’s my first impressions of the application, what are yours? Comments are open below.
[EDIT 1- added bullets to make the post easier to read]
[EDIT 2- Edited for grammar]
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