Every press release on the hosting news site recently is grid this and cloud that. Yes these new technologies have taken us all by storm. I use the word storm for multiple reasons which I will allude to shortly. A grid, cloud or cluster is basically a large collections of computers that spread resources across several servers. The advantage to this idea is you can add another server to the cloud and it will help improve all the sites. The cloud is definably a possible future solution to web hosting for most sites.

Most cloud hosting companies would have you believe that everything is soft and fluffy and for the most part they are. When you look over a long period of time though things are not so calm within the cloud. Here is the issues with clouds as I see them…

1. The clouds are still in beta with most companies. The technology works well with 1 site but as a shared solution with 100,000′s of sites it is not perfected. You are paying both money and your sites up time to use a beta service which they market as a high up time product.
2. When something goes wrong on the cloud it goes horribly wrong. Also what these companies won’t tell you is that these clouds are installed by 3rd party companies. They bring in a team of highly skilled experts to install and set it up. The problem is those experts are not in great abundance and the host you pay does not have one on staff.
3. When a cloud goes down you have 100,000′s of customers needing support. How long do you think it would take to reply to those tickets? I am willing to bet a while.
4. Sites that require a dedicated server seek out a possible cheaper cloud solution. Your fellow customers will be sucking the resources from those servers hard. For the price you pay for a cloud you can get your own managed dedicated server.

I am sure that one day clouds will be the standard in the hosting industry for shared hosting. Today they are not and I would not recommend it to anyone that is running a production site.

Note: we do provide a clustered managed server solution for customers with 1 site. These systems run a near 100% up time and can handle insane amounts of traffic.

Update: An example of what happens when a cloud dies. You will see it takes a long time to restore it and that it’s not the first time it happened.

As I was flipping through several of my local newspapers this morning, I noticed that nearly all of them featured the exact same advertisement from Telus, revealing the availability of the Samsung Omnia smartphone. Tech-savvy enthusiasts who follow the Canadian mobile phone market may have seen this one coming, but the masses are probably seeing this phone for the first time today.

As I continued to read through the world news and sports scores, I started to wonder if the strategy taken by Telus today is the best approach. The exact same full page ad was taken out on several national and local newspapers, so it didn’t matter which paper you picked up; they all had the same advertisement. In this way, Telus was certainly sending out a consistent message about finding “your smart fit.”

By taking the route of consistency, Telus may have a better chance of ensuring that its key message is being read and understood today. If you are exposed to the same item over and over again, you have a better chance of remembering it. Do you recall trying to memorize your multiplication tables in elementary school? This is the same kind of thing: constant exposure.

The flip side would have taken Telus on the path of variety. The Canadian wireless carrier could have put out several different advertisements in the different newspapers. This way, each ad would look fresh and novel. Our eyes are oftentimes drawn to that which is new, so each ad could receive the same level of attention. By contrast, if you notice the same ad in a different paper, you probably won’t read it again.

What do you think? If you’re about to embark on a major product launch, would you rather use the same ad across all channels or would you use several different ads to keep it fresh?

Last week we covered adding top-level menu items, which we will be expanding upon this week. Today we’re going to be adding submenus to our top-level menu, and also to the stock top-level menus.

If you’ve noticed that all these functions for menus are very similar, then you’re right. Most have a similar syntax, and work in much the same way. So, following this pattern, you can probably guess what function we’ll be using to add submenus. add_submenu_page() – let’s look at it’s syntax:

[code='php']add_submenu_page(parent, page_title, menu_title, capability, file, [function]);[/code]

• parent – The file that adds the top-level menu you want to add this submenu to. For a custom top-level menu, you can use __FILE__. For adding a submenu to a stock WordPress top-level menu, use the filename that the menu item links to (for example, to add a submenu under Appearance, you would use ‘themes.php’ for the parent parameter).
• page_title – The title of the options page.
• menu_title – The title of the submenu, to appear in the menu.
• capability – The capability required to access this submenu page.
• file – For custom top-level menu items, this should be a unique string. So if you had a submenu called Add Poll, you could make this parameter ‘addpoll’. For stock top-level menu items, use the file that handles the display of that top-level menu item.
• [function] – The function that handles the display of the page.

Now, we can add this onto our example code from last week:

[code='php']add_action('admin_menu', 'mgf_add_menu');
function mgf_add_menu() {
add_menu_page('Polls Options', 'Polls', 'manage_options', __FILE__, '', plugins_url('polls/menu-icon.png'));
add_submenu_page(__FILE__, 'New Poll', 'New Poll', 'manage_options', 'newpoll', 'mgf_new_poll');
}[/code]

There we (finally) have it. A top-level menu called Polls with a submenu called New Poll.

Last week we asked which do you think will have a bigger impact on businesses in the next 10 years and 86% said social meda. This weeks question is…

 

One of the ways you can greatly enhance the user experience on your blog is to speed up the page load time. There’s nothing more frustrating than showing up on a website and then waiting (and waiting) for the site to load. Some sites run too many scripts, for example, and these can make the page hang. Another issue that many bloggers face is that they like to post a lot of images. A picture is worth a thousand words, but they can take a while to load.

Part of the reason why images can take so long to load on a page is that each one of them creates a new HTTP request. This forces the server to look up each individual image before it can load it. You can significantly reduce the load time by reducing the number of HTTP requests. The cSprites WordPress plug-in achieves this very act by combining all your images into just one image, known as a sprite.

Instead of loading five separate images and getting the server to handle five separate HTTP requests, a blog with cSprites will only require a single HTTP request. This can drastically improve the load time, especially if you have a lot of pictures on your blog. Using this plug-in, you’ll be able to compress all of those images into a single sprite, displayed in parts.

You can see a demo (including load time stats) on Mummey.org and you can download the cSprites WordPress plug-in on WordPress.org.

• BlueFur Twitter Contest
  Posted on Sunday, March 1st, 2009 in Contest – Comments: (41)
  And the winner is…..With over 800 entries into the our first Twitter Contest we have randomly selected a winner. The winner of the laptop is @mustard_green. I have sent them a DM on winning and the laptop will be sent out ASAP.Want a chances to win another laptop?That’s right were giving away another laptop in March. We are offering a brand new Acer Aspire AS6530.
• Business 101: Non Revenue-Generating Products
  Posted on Tuesday, March 17th, 2009 in Business Topics – Comments: (6)
  Most businesses have some products in their lineup that do not directly generate any revenue. When you go to a coffee shop, for example, you are given “free” napkins, sugar, cream, stir sticks, disposable paper cups, and so on. When you go to a clothing store, you are offered a “free” shopping bag to tote your purchase back home. These are all valid expenses for their respective businesses, but they do not generate any revenue on their own.
• Community Poll
  Posted on Wednesday, March 11th, 2009 in Polls – Comments: (4)
  Last week we asked do you have kids and 63% said no. This weeks question is…
• Marketing 101: Under New Management
  Posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 in Marketing Tips – Comments: (7)
  When you decide to purchase a business from someone else, should you exclaim to the world that the company is now under new management? There are certainly different schools of thought on this matter and it really depends on the nature of the transaction and a number of other factors that can affect the public’s perception of what the company or business has to offer.
• Weekend Projects: Log Check
  Posted on Saturday, March 21st, 2009 in Weekend Projects – Comments: (7)
  This week our project will be to check our error logs and clean up those errors.To start login to cPanel and click on Error Log. This will bring up a list of the last 100 or so errors.One of the most common errors you will see in the log is a File does not exist robots.txt. This is easy to fix by simply adding a blank robots.