Category: Blogging

WTM, Travel Bloggers and their Avatars (2) – James Craven

I met James Craven (@CravenTravels) for the first time at TBCamp2011. A very nice guy with whom I tweet already some time and whom I very much liked to meet IRL (In Real Life) while the time was too short to talk shop a bit more.

Does he look like his Avatar? Just Look at this Twilk Wall (and click on the image if it is too small for your old eyes):

Craven on Twilk Small

You probably see what I mean.

  1. James is a very nice bloke, but I like to meet him, not the two kids he is on the photo with.
  2. Also nice is that the avatar shows James is conscious of poppy day…however on the wall the poppy is almost as big as his head.
  3. It seems to me the photo used for his avatar is not very recent.
  4. If you study the Twilk wall, you also see that if you want to use a portrait, make it discernible on such wall, much more a close up.
  5. Now especially James: He is a sales person and should know the first impression can kill any deal….I ask you…

My 2 cents

Update:

As a sequel to TBCamp 11 Darren wondered whether Social Media are killing discussions on blogs. Sure they do, but you can cut and paste the answers in the post….

Last edited by GJE on November 14, 2011 at 11:57 pm

Impressions from TBCamp 2011

Two Spanish Ladies at TBCamp 2011

Darren did it again: He pulled 100+ Travel Bloggers and Travel PR types together for informal networking at Travel Blog Camp 2011. A big Thank You to Darren!

The venue was back where it started in 2008: in a London Pub at the south border of the Thames with a nice view over the city.

The food was excellent and the new two room set up was great where food was served in one room and the venue was in the other room.

I was acting as the “Official Photographer of the event”, hence I was more concentrated on making photos in very difficult (dark) light conditions, than on what actually was going on.

Luckily there were some who summarized the event:

I’ll be updating this if I find more stuff.

One take away from the event for me is: Travel Bloggers have to become more business like. Especially those who want to monetize their blogs. Thus far, I have refused to try and monetize this blog. So there is some work to be done if I want to monetize… and eventually that is what I wish

As an amateur photographer I noticed another aspect: The use of avatars by travel bloggers. One comment you can see in my prior post and further comments on the use of avatars will follow.

Also I wasn’t up to networking as I should have been and due to the light conditions I couldn’t take more or better photos than I did. Sorry for that.

I was making photos on Darren’s first ever TBCamp of 2008. For comparison’s sake you might want to look at the First TBCamp set.

Personally I like the photos of TBcamp10 better.

Last edited by GJE on November 14, 2011 at 11:53 pm

WTM, Travel Bloggers and their Avatars (1) – Debbie Hindle

I saw Debbie (see BGB and @BGBcomms ) in action at WTM and took a shot behind about 200 people in a full social media session from which I cut out this portrait.

Debbie works in Travel PR and is one of still few PR types who is actively engaging with travel bloggers and social media.

I’ve bugged many people online that they should use an avatar that you can recognize from afar and that enables you to identify the person in question if you see the avatar in a stream or on a wall and moreover that you will be able to recognize them when you meet them in real life. An avatar is a marketing tool for your own brand!

This is the portrait Debbie uses for her Twitter account:

A wonderful portrait and from this you would no doubt recognize her if you met her in real life. However avatars are very small and avatars are in people’s mind when they try to discern someone they know in a room full of people they do not know very well.

If you compare the portraits now cropped to avatar size, wouldn’t you agree with me that the color portrait is far better tham the black and white one? You may use this one if you wish, Debbie!

Update
About half a year after this post Debbie took my advice and changed the Black and White Avatar for a Colored one.

Last edited by GJE on July 22, 2012 at 4:32 pm

Websynthesis – Coppyblogger steps into WordPress only Hosting

Oh Irony 1

Just while I’m in the middle of the (too lengthy) process of deciding whether to stay with VPS.net or change hosting provider again and even go to a dedicated WordPress hosting outfit, I see a pre-battle tweet by Brian Clark AKA Copyblogger that nobody has done it right so far. When someone asks him whether he had looked into WPEngine he answered:

Yes, we decided to roll out our own Websyntesis. Apart from WordPress itself, this is the third dedicated WordPress only hoster after Page.ly and WPEngine I’m aware of.

Oh Irony 2: Copyblogger is a former Thesis partner – hence the name?

Last year there was much ado about Matt Mullenweg threatening to sue Chris Pearson of Thesis with respect to the theme’s GPL compliance. I started my post with:

Yesterday I opened my dashboard and noticed syn-thesis-1 by Matt Mullenweg in a window

While this was going on Chris Pearon and Brian Clark split up their partnership and Brian gave an interview to Technosailer about this split up. Guess what? Technosailor is one of the guys behind WPEngine.[Oh Irony update: I found out Technosailor stepped down first and left WP Engine entirely later]

Afterward Copyblogger teamed up with Genesis od Studiopress, a WordPress theme framework developping community.

Oh Irony 3: Chris Pearson is on VPS.net

He seems decently served by VPS.net. However I’m not sure anymore he’s still there.

Oh Irony 4: Woothemes is also on VPS.net

Next to Genesis and Thesis Woothemes is the third big WordPress theme developper and also they are seemingly served well by VPS.net..

Preliminary thoughts

  • You can only host at Websyntesis if you use the Genesis theme. Not for me for the moment.
  • Theme wars just one step further…As Chris has promised his version 2.0 for over a year now without delivering…this might be an inducement to step away from Thesis.
  • Brian claims the cemetery of WordPress blogs with hosting issues is only due to wrong theme coding..I really doubt this, because I’ve experienced strange things with later versions of WordPress after 2.8. It could be in the WordPress core coding as well IMHO.
  • It’s about time for a European counter intitiative in dedicated WordPress hosting.

Update

And I just discovered another US based WordPress only hosting party: Zippykid

Last edited by GJE on January 5, 2012 at 11:07 pm

To VPS or Not to VPS?

VPS logo "in tha cloud"

Introduction

Some readers may remember that a year ago Happy Hotelier and its significant sister blog Chair Blog were kicked from its then shared hosting plan by a Dutch Hosting Company without any pre warning. I was Furious!, to say the least. After the dust had settled it appeared (and they admitted) they had been overselling.

Hasty move to a US based shared hosting plan

All of a sudden I had to find another hosting company. I found and moved to Westhost through a post by Yoast.

I was very impressed with Westhost’s outfit and client service…I felt I was back to “normal”

However, shared hosting proved too slow

I found my sites loading too slow. As Yoast’s article also mentioned VPS.net and I respected Yoast’s expertise I followed his advice to try and use VPS.net……So in December 2010 I moved to VPS.net, which, with the benefit of hindsight I regret:

My 10 months uptime

These snippets from my pingdom report show A measly uptime of 97,23 % – Total Downtime since December 8, 2010: 8 days 15 hrs and 49 minutes with 190 instances!!!!

It is noteworthy to see that the numerous comments to this original post of Yoast seem having disappeared completely. In a Twitter conversation Yoast admitted the comments dissappeared though his own fault through a sloppy MySQL dump. [update] However with the number trimmed down they can now be found on a Separate Page.

Yoast’s Second Post

A couple of weeks ago Yoast published a second post about VPS.Net Cloud Hosting, Cloud Servers, what’s the difference? It featured an interview with one of the guys at VPS.NET. I just read it when my sites were down for 5 hours on September 4/5 and made a comment in a series what turned out to be many comments, mostly of people who had issues with VPS.Net.

Some VPS net clients reported about their dissatisfaction

Through the posts of Yoast and via Twitter I found som blog posts from other (former) clients of VPS.net:

  • VPS.Net Cloud Hosting – Why I canceled my account after 2 days – Sangat Pedas.
  • Reelseo was another VPS client who was not amused.
  • N0on3 posted very extensively about his experience mainly the lack of backups
  • Wegopro In Dutch
  • Tentblogger was not amused as well.

Yoast’s Third VPS Net post

Yoast was taken aback by the many negative comments the prior post attracted.

Therefore, in VPS Net Issues and what they do about it Yoast grilled the CEO of VPS.net in an interview with some tough questions and some pertinent answers from the CEO.

However, My situation even deteriorated afterward:

Pingdom September and Oktober Outages

Click the image for the full downtime report according to Pingdom: Uptime 93.08 % Downtime over three days in hardly two months at 93 instances with September 5 with 5 hours and September 15 with 10 hours and September 16/17 with 29 hours downtime the most frustrating days…

You have to be a Geek bigtime to be able to manage a VPS!

  • Domain registration management. Do keep it separate from your hosting provider in case you want to move away from your hosting provider. Rather than moving a domain from one hosting outfit to another which can take up to 5 working days, you can easily change the url to where your site is hosted and depending on the TTL you’ve set the propagation can be as fast as a couple of hours.
  • You must always keep a separate e-mail, because if you don’t and your VPS goes down, there is no other way of communicating with the support other than a slow web based ticket system
  • Server management. Anybody know how to login into and manage an Apache server from a command line? I don’t. It is very specific linux stuff.
  • How to secure or harden your server against outside intrusions? I’m not technical enough to give you guidance.
  • How to manage a CDN (a Content Delivery Network)?
  • Control panels for the VPS (the server itself)?
  • Control pannels for the programs you want to be run by your VPS?
  • Updating the stuff.
  • Preparing for calamities with backups and so on.

I can assure you it is a steep learning curve and actually much too time consuming to be bothered with. I’m sure Yoast is well versed in all these matters, but I am not and I don’t want to be. I simply want to be able to run my business and occasionally post here and on my other blog, without all this hassle.

Alternatives for VPS Hosting

I came across two companies who do dedicated WordPress hosting: Page-Ly and WPEngine. Both take away the hassle from you.

If you are interested here are some reads about them:

Page-Ly relies on Firehosting. WPEngine relies on its own servers (and not on Amazon as I assumed earlier).

I’m very much inclined to make the step to WPEngine despite the following consideration:

In Which Country do I want to host?

Basically I don’t want to host my site outside The Netherlands. The reason is that I am not familiar with the ins and outs of foreign (mostly Anglo Saxon) law and I don’t want to get involved into another legal system by the mere fact my sites are hosted in a foreign jurisdiction. The Netherlands itself has red tape enough.

That’s the reason I’ve tried a VPS plan with XLS hosting in the meantime. XLS hosting is a pure Dutch provider, but has a setback: It’s helpdesk closes after office time. But during the day I’m usually busy with my business and later in the evening I can find some time to go into hosting details so their service level doesn’t work for me.

I’ve also tried JaguarPC as they advertised having Dutch clouds. However after signing on they admitted that they wouldn’t start new Dutch clouds in the foreseable future.

Preliminary Conclusion

So despite their setbacks I’ve decided to try VPS.net once more with their AMS based cloud servers.The speed of VPS.net is great as well as its support..They promised me a migration….Also, their slogan is 100% uptime, but they do not refund you for downtime…they credit you for future use…..

Or am I being stupid staying with them one more time?

Updates:

  1. It went very well for 6 weeks…
  2. After an appalling almost 9 hours downtime on December 29, 2011 I’ve decided to move away to Dediserve

Last edited by GJE on April 20, 2012 at 9:50 am