Jonathan's blog

This blog, and my other blogs, used to run on a rather old server: two 1GHz Pentium III processors, 1GB memory and 2 x 18GB SCSI hard drives. I host with Ridgeon Network, which is owned by my friend Chris. I help him out with some networking stuff from time to time so he loaned me this spare server for personal use.

A few weeks back one of the hard drives failed. Service continued as normal but it was an acute reminder that the server was getting old.

Recently Chris bought a powerful server for use as a VMWare ESXi hypervisor, along with a large iSCSI SAN to host all the disk images, and powerful shared MySQL database server. As he was moving lots of his servers from physical boxes to virtual machines, I decided to do likewise.

So this website, and my other sites, are now hosted on a CentOS virtual machine, with their databases on a separate CentOS database server. Given that the load average on the old P3 wasn’t very high I wasn’t expecting a noticeable improvement in performance. But how wrong I was! The site is noticeably faster to load and navigate, and in particular the WordPress management interface is miles faster.

All in all, I’m happy with the new platform. To anyone else considering replacing old servers with a virtualised infrastructure, I say go for it. You’ll save tons of electricity, take up less rack space, pave the way for later expansion (by adding more hypervisors or more disks to the SAN) and have better manageability and backupabilitiy.

A while back, my younger brother Edmund wanted a photo blog, just like his big brother’s

I set him up with a free subdomain from No-IP. The address used to be edmund.servepics.com. I couldn’t fault the service from No-IP, but unfortunately free domains don’t only attract impoverished teenage photographers. They attract spammers and phishers, too.

As a result, the entire servepics.com subdomain is blacklisted by:

• MSN Messenger. Sending a message including a link to his blog is blocked for an “unknown reason”.
• Bristol University’s malicious content filtering.
• My blogs. Any comments or links from his blog are automatically sent to spam, no matter how many times I mark it as not spam.
• Everyone’s email servers. Any email from this domain is binned by most email providers.
• Countless other people and services who don’t like online criminals.

So I decided it was time he became a man, and I signed him up for his own domain. You can now see his photos at www.edmundgazeley.co.uk. Enjoy!

Today I signed up for Twitter – not for personal reasons but because I needed it for work. Of course I’ve heard about it in the past as the leading micro-blogging service, but it hadn’t interested me in the slightest.

I have used Facebook since its early days (when you could only get in if you had an academic email address!), primarily to keep in touch with friends. When they brought out the status updates feature, I couldn’t see the point. Even less so having something like Twitter that’s purely status updates.

There are so many ways these days to get content out there and onto the web. But I can’t see the point in many of the newer sites.

Facebook

Like I said, I use Facebook as a way to keep up with friends whom I don’t see very often. While I was at school, MSN Messenger was all the rage, but now we’re a bit more grown up we don’t all have time to sit on MSN all night. So Facebook is a convenient way to keep in touch from time to time – given that email is only really used for work these days.

But my only friends on Facebook are friends in real life. I don’t meet people through Facebook. For me, it’s just a direct replacement for emailing friends or chatting on MSN. I don’t broadcast my life to the world. I can’t see why they’d care.

Twitter

Which brings me onto Twitter. I can’t imagine that anyone would be interested in snippets of my daily life. If they’re that interested, they can text me and ask. As I mentioned, I now have a Twitter feed and you can follow me if you want – but I don’t recommend it. I’m not intending to write anything interesting – only to use it for following boring feeds like these from the University of Bristol.

Blogs and websites

I’m more interested in personal websites, often in blog format. Maybe it’s because I used the web for years before these social, collaborative sites popped up, and the only resources available were traditional websites.

I’ve had my own website for over a decade now, in one form or another. When I was a kid, I didn’t have much of interest to say and there was nothing on the site. Nowadays I have two blogs: this one, mainly for technical articles, guides, reviews and so on; and my photo blog where I publish photos that I have taken.

Flickr

I’m a geek, and so I have my own server and I run these blogs from scratch using WordPress. Obviously such an approach isn’t going to work for everyone, which is why I like sites like Flickr. It’s a really easy way to get your work online. I set up my own Flickr page some time ago, before I decided where I was primarily going to host my photos.

As you can see, there’s hardly anything on it and only two comments. I’ve worked a bit harder to promote my official photo blog, which also gives me the freedom to customise it exactly as I want, and here I have had thousands of views of my photos.

In summary

I’m not saying that “Web 2.0” is a bad thing – I’m just saying it only works for me in limited ways.

I want to publish my articles and photos in a more traditional format, and I only use Facebook because most of my mates don’t use MSN any more.