I decided to create a whole new blog topic to congregate my Running posts.

http://thatlinuxbox.com/blog/index.ph...ic=running

I guess this means I will have to continue posting about running... which means I will also have to keep running... so really this is a motivational tool as well.

Geeklog is the CMS / Blog engine written in PHP that powers this site (http://thatlinuxbox.com/blog/).

The Geeklog project has been accepted as a student mentoring organization for the Google Summer of Code(tm) 2010. This is Geeklog's fourth year in the program.


For more information, see:

http://www.geeklog.net/article.php/su...-code-2010

I have been spending time in the Gimp making graphics for my wife's web site, so I decided to make a logo for my blog. It is not fancy, just a retro tech font with a transparent background. Here's what it should look like in the header bar for thatlinuxbox.com:

As mentioned in thatlinuxbox.com now runs on a Linode, I switched from A2 Hosting to Linode a few weeks ago. The new Linode server is running great so today I canceled my A2 Hosting account.

I ditched A2 Hosting because the low apache MaxClients settings meant my sites were giving 503 errors and when pages did load ok they were generally missing images.

Beware so-called "Unlimited" shared web hosting plans. They are cheap for a reason. The MaxClients setting makes an effective bottleneck to limit site traffic and usage. When I asked A2 Hosting about this problem they suggested that I upgrade to one of their own VPS hosing packages. Um, no thanks. I switched providers instead.

It seems like there is an un-tapped niche in there somewhere. My Linode 360 costs $20 / month. I was paying $6 / month for the A2 Executive Web Hosting Plan. I would have loved to pay $12 for shared hosting that did not suck.

However, now that I'm on a Linode VPS plan I am probably hooked... it is really darn convenient to have my irssi client logged into IRC all the time and available to me anywhere I can get an SSH shell.

Due to issues with shared web hosting plans (mostly due to insanely low apache MaxClients setting), I have moved all of my thatlinuxbox sites over to a Xen VPS solution offered by Linode.com (www.linode.com).  Linode compares well with SliceHost and other VPS providers, although Linode offers 360 MB RAM and 20 GB of disk space (the plan I chose) which gave them an edge in my comparison.

There is a lot more administration overhead with VPS compared to shared web hosting, but my sites actually work and I have flexibility to run whatever software I want including rsync and irssi.  I am very pleased so far and all of my sites are snappy again.

It all started with me wanting to find "Science Fiction books published last month that were not about vampires."

According to the Amazon Advanced Search page, the minus sign "-" is supposed to indicate a "NOT" search.  I started by searching the books section for "-vampires".  Amazon says:

Your search "-vampires" did not match any products in: Books

Now I know that vampire books are popular these days, but I'm fairly certain there are at least a few Fantasy/SciFi books at Amazon.com that are not about vampires.

I tried again using the Advanced Search book search page (http://www.amazon.com/b/?node=241582011), making sure that "-vampires" was in the keywords field.  Again, no matching results.

I tried the "books written by Malcolm X but not an autobiography" search listed on the Advanced Search page as a Real-world Example... again no matching results.  Clicking the link to "See the results" of the example Malcom X search finds no matching results.

I looked all over the Amazon.com site for a way to report a web site problem.  None of the information at http://www.amazon.com/help was useful to report this kind of issue, at least as far as I could tell.  I was unable to locate any email contacts or web forms to submit feedback on the site itself.  I googled for other reports of this issue and didn't find anything. 

I resorted to emailing the generic webmaster address.

Here is the reply I received from Amazon:

A few weeks ago I posted Hosting Delivery appears to be dead. Well, they did finally respond to my support ticket after I had already moved my content to a new web hosting provider. It sounds like they are still in business.

support at hostingdelivery.com wrote:

Thank you for your time and consideration on reporting on this matter. We had a domain name dispute and this resulted in the domain name being "lost".

From this morning the domain name is operational again. Now we are "back in business" and will continue servicing our clients like you. We have big plans from here on including a re-design of our whole infrastructure and moving to more powerful servers.

Stay tuned for more changes.

If you have any questions or comments please do not hesitate to contact us again.

I'm still quite happy with my new web hosting provider, A2 Hosting.

Update: I am cancelling my A2 Hosting account because my sites had many issues on their shared servers. A2 Hosting sets apache MaxClients setting to 35 and my sites continually served visitors HTTP 503 errors (503 Error Resource limit exceeded) instead of my content. On many pages, the user would not see an error page but the pages would have missing images. HostingDelivery.com was way better with regards to 503 errors and I would probably still be a HostingDelivery customer if I hadn't been scared away by their domain name registration issue.

Now I am a happy Linode.com customer. See my brief writeup: thatlinuxbox.com now runs on a Linode.

My old web hosting company Hosting Delivery (http://hostingdelivery.com) appears to have disappeared, closed their doors, gone out of business, or just plain quit. HD let their domain name expire and they no longer respond to support tickets. The web server machine was still up and my sites continued to work, but these events told me that it was time to locate a new hosting provider.

I have found a new hosting provider that I am very happy with, A2 Hosting. This provider was recommended to me by some fellow geeks.

I am now getting a lot more for a lot less money. Features include SSH access, Ruby on Rails, git, and unlimited everything. Server performance is great, the machine has 8 CPU cores and 8 GB of RAM. If you are shopping for a new provider, give a2hosting.com a try.

After about a year, I am blogging again. I still have some theme and layout changes to make but all of the old content seems to be here.

It appears that RSS feeds are working now, too.

Here is my first post. Bask in its glory.