Even though I haven’t been posting much lately, there’s been a lot going on behind the scenes as far as website stuff. The most significant thing I did recently was to get moved off of my Dreamhost dedicated server and get everything set up on a new Site5 shared server. Dreamhost was killing me on the monthly fees, which I kind of resent since I had been a Dreamhost customer for more than five years. I think Dreamhost should have annual account reviews to see that their customers are in the best hosting plan for their needs and that their pricing stays competitive, especially for what they charge for a dedicated server (actually I think they don’t even offer dedicated servers anymore, so maybe they wanted me to leave). It definitely seems like there are much better hosting deals now compared to when I signed up with Dreamhost in 2002, and for much less money. Plus I know how competitive the hosting biz is. But to be fair, when has a company ever approached you and said, “Hey, we think you’re paying us too much.” Wouldn’t that be refreshing? So in the end, I’m saving…ready for this?...$200 a month! The Site5 account is unbelievable. They offer “the totally ridiculous five dollar web hosting deal,” where they charge $5 a month (paid in advance) for 55GB of storage, 5 TB of transfer, and you can host up to 55 domains. That might not be a suitable replacement if you have a bunch of big, high-traffic sites, but it works for me. And on top of all that, they’re the best hosting company I’ve dealt with so far, and I’ve used 9 different web hosts in the past six years. If you need a great host, check them out.
One of the reason’s I chose Site5 is because they are very popular in the Drupal forums whenever the subject of Drupal hosting comes up. You might notice that the appearance of WhirledView.com has changed, but what might not be as obvious is that I have a much more powerful and scalable platform behind this site now, and that’s thanks to Drupal. I won’t bore you with all the stuff I love about Drupal, but it’s very “Web 2.0” and I use it on several of my other sites. One of the new features I want to draw your attention to is the ability to create user accounts. I notice a couple of you have already signed up, which is great, but for those of you who haven’t, please do. This will allow you to create a personalized account where you can include a link to your own site, track your comments, participate in forums, and otherwise be included in my WhirledView.
The site looks great! I'll have to talk to you at some point about how much hacking was necessary to set up a great-looking blog, or if it was a matter of being well-familiar with what was already there in Drupal to configure it as a blog. Drupal has something of a steep initial learning curve, precisely because it is so customizable. It has the potential to be a lot of things to a lot of possible applications -- a sophisticated CMS for whatever type of C yr tryin' to M.
Anyway, I *so* feel you about Dreamhost. I like them fine, but when I pay for a year of hosting in advance several years in a row, each time it comes up for me to renew I want them to work a little to keep me. I've gone as far as e-mailing them and asking if they would "do anything for me" considering that it's time for me to make the decision, and got back a snarky answer that boiled down to: "renew or don't renew. it's up to you." In other words, NO effort to woo me. The thought of switching servers was enough to keep me, but really...that's not customer loyalty!
I have to give all the credit for the nice looks to the designer of the Amadou theme. I usually start with the Zen theme and customize from there, but after I installed Amadou, I liked it so much I didn't want to change anything. I do want to create a nice logo eventually, but keeping things simple design-wise makes it easier to upgrade and troubleshoot when adding new features.
Once you've got Drupal installed it's not bad at all to set it up. There are several improvements with 5.x that have made me officially fall in love with it. A basic customization can really just be a matter of uploading whatever modules you want and enabling them in the admin, then changing the way stuff displays in blocks. You can easily position those blocks through the admin. I run multiple sites off of a single Drupal codebase, and I'm starting to develop a consistent procedure for setting up a Drupal site, so getting new Drupal sites up gets easier all the time. Let me know if you ever need some help.
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