If you are seeing this message, then you are now seeing my website served up through my new webhost, HostMonster.  I decided to switch from a VPS back to simple shared hosting.  I realized that it didn't really make sense for me to have my own server as I wasn't really taking advantage of it. It was nice to have my site load a few milliseconds faster, but it really wasn't worth the money I was spending.

For those of you who don't know, I originally was using the Business Shared Hosting from 1and1, but the servers kept getting slower and slower. Shared hosting companies are known for overloading shared boxes with more users than is necessary and I assume that's what happened.  I really liked 1and1 and was sad to see that they couldn't come up with a good solution for me. Oddly enough, almost a year later I still am paying for their service as I haven't gotten around to tranferring my brother's and other peoples sites off of the old 1and1 servers.  On the other hand, I did move my main website off of the 1and1 servers and onto a Virtual Private Server (VPS) running on VPSLink.com hardware.

It was a learning experience with VPSLink and now that it's all said and done, I learned a lot and enjoyed the experience - even though Laura might say otherwise. ;) I have decided that it doesn't make sense to pay $37 for hosting ($10 for 1and1's hosting and $27 for VPSLink) so I am finally in the process of moving all the hosts over to the new server.  I packaged up all the databases and files last night and shipped them over the wire - around 1.1 GB (gigabytes) worth of data in just over 2 minutes. The speed of the transfer was all due to one of the core requirements I have when looking at any type of hosting: Shell Access. I'll explain the details later, but it provides a lot of flexibility.

Anyway - the big thing is my main website (boshdirect) and all the subsites are moved over to HostMonster.  I'll let you know how things go!

(Next up is updating my site to Joomla 1.5)

I'm thinking about upgrading my website to Joomla! 1.5. I'm currently running the 1.0.x series and while I don't post to my website much, I think I should update to a new version.  Community Builder recently release 1.2 which is J!1.5 native stable and plenty of other components and plugins are doing the same. Fireboard is moving towards the 1.5 codebase and some of my favorite plugins like JCE are moving that way as well.

Yet again, I have typed up another long entry in Joomla just to have it all disappear because Joomla (and it's Editor components) suck at handling sessions. I won't get into that here, but I do want to get a piece of information across that isn't widely available on the internet.  I messed with my Icon Size and Spacing (horizontal and vertical) in Windows XP and I couldn't find the original settings to change it back to.  I pulled it up on another one of my computers and figured I would post it on the internet for all to see.

Icon Spacing (vertical): 43
Icon Spacing (horizontal): 43

A quick side-note that I made on my original post was the fact that windows will only display icons up to 72px and the built-in windows icons usually only scale "gracefully" up to about 48px. In contrast, Mac OS X will display icons up to 128px and every icon I have ever seen on a Mac will fully scale to that with no problem. To read more about this, see the icon topic at XvsXP.

I set a lot of reminders for myself on my company e-mail and I don't have a blackberry yet. I kind of want one for all the great features, but on the other hand I'm concerned with how connected that would make me and thus make me feel obligated to respond. Here's a list of e-mail addresses for some of the most popular carriers (in the US) just replace phonenumber in the addresses below with the proper phone number.

T-Mobile: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Virgin Mobile: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Cingular: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Sprint: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Verizon: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Nextel: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

As a side note, you can also do this with a service called teleflip. It's the same thing as sending it to one of the other formats, but it adds a footer to the e-mail that says "Email on your cell - teleflip.com". I just use my SprintPCS address like above to send reminder messages to myself and it's not that hard for me to remember the one address. I can see how it would be beneficial if you wanted to send messages to multiple people though. Teleflip also has some commercial offerings on their website that do more advanced e-mail to SMS features. To use teleflip, send the e-mail to the following:

Teleflip: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it