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Lowlands!

Personal

Reminder: I'll be blogging live from Lowlands festival this weekend on my Capsi Journal.

Lowlands 2008 Live Moblog

Blogging elsewhere

Capsi

Although I will keep this blog around, I haven't yet decided what to do with. I have been will be primarily using my Capsi journal. Update your links, bookmarks, RSS feed readers and continue reading at Capsi!

Use Amazon S3 storage or not?

Software

Capsi is not in jeopardy of requiring more bandwidth and storage than planend for with its current hosting solution. It is however the goal that one day it will require more resources - and I'd like to plan ahead.

Capsi's current host, EngineHosting, is probably the best entry-level hosting provider when it comes to knowledge, support and reliability. They on quality of service, where budget hosts tend to oversell resulting in questionable availability and horribly incompetent support. Not EngineHosting - they know what they're doing.

The downside? EngineHosting offers limited disk space and data traffic. So I have the feeling that splitting dynamic content from static content would be a good decision in the long run. So let's do some math, assuming bandwidth is a greater resource risk than storage. What would the next 5GB of traffic (average filesize 50k, so that's 100,000 requests) cost? And what's the next upgrade step?

Let's take a look at the options:

Don't be surprised if Capsi's static content will soon be hosted on S3..

Additional benefits:

Yup, I'm going to give it a go with a couple of static images. And if I'm happy with the performance, reliability, ease-of-use and costs.. I will definitely port the user content uploads towards S3. Another added benefit, albeit specific to Capsi: this would be a great opportunity to obfuscate content names more, providing better privacy for users using Capsi's access levels.

Last but not least: Neil will probably complain how Amazon is naughty for its one-click shopping patent, but to be honest I don't think life will be much fun if you're going to avoid every single bit of evil..

Chat chat chat!

Capsi

Capsi has come full circle: when it was still my personal web site back in 1996 one of the features was a chat room. As of today, Capsi (now a community and profile site) has a chat again! The Capsi Chat is back!

Information for registered users

Capsi

If you have a user account here and use it to maintain a personal calendar, now is the time to stop using it and instead get busy on Capsi. It is now ten times better than this place! You'll get your own journal, picture albums, concert statistics.. you'll love it. The only reason to stay here is if you enter a lot of free-entry calendar dates containing non-concert events. I will add free-entry events to Capsi soon though and when that happens the entire gigs and calendar sections of this site will be removed once users had the time to migrate.

If you have any questions, please let me know.

I'm not dead!

Personal

It's been three weeks since the last post - eight since the one before that. But I'm not dead, in fact.. I think I'll go for a walk. (Reference will most likely be missed by 80% of the five readers I have left.)

No, it is simply so that life has kept me busy.

There have been ups (concerts, Halloween, K3 Kusjesparade, booking my skiing trip) and there have been downs (mostly work related, but I've also been ill and away).

Capsi continues to get better every week and yet I am still not convinced it is everything I want it to be. And it probably won't be in a few weeks either because I'm taking a small detour for another new project. Fortunately just a blog and therefore much smaller in scale when it comes to programming. "Should be up in no-time!" (TM)

Good i18n code for websites

Software

Today I registered the capsi.nl domain just to make sure I will put some effort into writing some internationalisation code and start offering translated versions of Capsi.

Dutch seemed like the right choice for the first translation, me being able to translate into it myself.

First I will write a prototype i18n function, then use it for menus and other relatively static content and finally I'll have to tackle the dynamic content.

As a sidenote, the reason I won't rely on GeoIP, or at least not solely, are search engine crawlers. They offer no method for content negotiation other than separate URLs and I'd rather score high in results for non-English queries than.. well, not at all.

Fun with Google Maps

Capsi

Future scenario: a reader finds a concert or venue on my new site. The address is listed, pictures of past shows appear.. all is good and fun. But wouldn't it be nice to know where exactly the venue can be found? It would!

Well, it looks like that's exactly what I'll be offering. Here's an example showing the local pub on a satellite/map hybrid view, generated using a .klm file I saved from Google Earth (and will be dynamically generating once I add coordinates for venues to the database).

/img/journal/20070726-googlemaps.png

Still needs some work (custom icons, more venues, a label for the venue selected, links to the venue page of other venues showing in the area).. but nonetheless I'm happy.

Capsi is back on Capsi.com!

Capsi

It's still a technology preview only, but at least it's on a proper host now: my Capsi live music community site. :)

Let's get a real hosting provider

Capsi

For a few years now, this site has been hosted with Powweb: cheap but not extremely reliable. Like many hosting providers, Powweb appears to be overselling their servers resulting in less than optimal performance. And first line technical support is pretty much clueless, answering questions from scripts and lacking even basic knowledge about the technologies they use. It's not that I need help with these, but it's kind of annoying when they break RFCs and URLs with a quote in then don't work even when some journal tags would like to use them.

Still, I don't really care about that for a small personal site. For Capsi however, I have higher ambitions and even though I don't expect it to become an instant hit I want to make sure hosting problems are not going to be an issue. So after some research I've decided to go with Engine Hosting, formerly known as pMachine Hosting. They're not as cheap as some others, but you get what you pay for: reasonable limits on data/bandwidth and a support staff that actually knows what they're talking about. I'm no longer interested in "technical support" asking me for my password so they can check my e-mail account when I ask about the IDLE feature of IMAP. EngineHosting's response to my pre-sales question was a lot more useful:

> Does your IMAP server support the idle command
> to provide push e-mail for mobile phones?

Here is a cut and paste of the IMAP CAPABILITY command from our IMAP port:

* CAPABILITY IMAP4 IMAP4REV1 ACL NAMESPACE UIDPLUS IDLE LITERAL+ QUOTA ID
MULTIAPPEND LISTEXT CHILDREN BINARY LOGIN-REFERRALS UNSELECT STARTTLS AUTH=LOGIN
AUTH=PLAIN AUTH=CRAM-MD5 AUTH=DIGEST-MD5 AUTH=GSSAPI AUTH=MSN AUTH=NTLM

While I have not used the IMAP / IDLE function from a mobile phone it has been
tested/works from desktop client applications that support the IDLE command so there
should not be any problems on the mobile side as long as the software on the phone
supports it well.

Now that's a hosting company I can do business with!

As for Capsi, this means that I will be moving the technology preview away from its temporary URL shortly, finally making it available on www.capsi.com. Once that has been taken care of I will do my best to finish enough basics to allow for beta registrations and finally get the site up and running. :)

© Copyright 1995-2008 Robert John Kaper. All rights reserved.

Tom has more friends but mine are prettier! (#1/1)