Personal Sites

Site amalgamation

I’m probably getting old, but I’ve reached the point where I feel that I have too many websites to manage!

As a result, I’m going to look at amalgamating some of them.  The first two that I’m merging is my TobyNet blog (this one) and PetersJokes.  All the existing URL’s will be set to point to petertoby.com which will now become the primary web address for my all my “stuff”.

I think that merging these sites will make things easier for me to manage and I’ll be more likely to update the info with news and jokes.

Here I am!

I’ve decided to make the blog at blogger.com my home – for now anyway!

I’ll post a little more regularly from now on as I have a little more time to do so.

My Blog dilemma

I know this is dragging on a little. I don’t for minute think that this is interesting to anyone other than me, but I’ll keep posting my thoughts on this as it’s serving to be therapeutic…. if you know what I mean

The aim of settling on a blog is to fulfil the following requirements:

• Somewhere to post things that interest me, and to post photos – some of which I want to be available only to certain people (i.e. family photos).
• Software that’s easy to use and looks nice (to me). I’m getting to the stage where I don’t want to tinker with code too much any more – been there, done that.
• Low cost or free.

That doesn’t sound too hard does it? In theory, you’d be right but in practice it’s a little more difficult!

I think I’ve narrowed it down to a couple of ideas now. I’ve dismissed sites like MySpace, Zoints, and Yahoo! 360 as they don’t have the nicest interfaces and aren’t very configurable.

What I’m realistically left with is 3 choices:

• Keep the blog on Blogspot as I currently have
• Use Blogger to post and publish it onto my private site and install Coppermine gallery
• Use a blogging software on my site that includes a gallery

The investigations continue!

What I'm doing with my blogs

I’m making my decision on one of the following 5 blogs at present:

• This one at Blogger
• My Space http://blog.myspace.com/petersweb
• My installation of Community Server at www.toby.net.au
• Yahoo! 360 at http://360.yahoo.com/yellowandblack58
• Zoints http://www.zoints.com

For the next week or two I’ll post everything on all 3 blogs while I get used to how they operate. After this “trial” period, I’ll make a decision on which one to keep.

New Web Host

My current Linux Web Host, Ausweb has let me down on 2 occasions in the past Month.

On both occasions, the sites I’ve hosted with them have been down (as well as their own website!) for a sizeable amount of time.

The first time, the site was down for around an hour. When I asked them about it, I wasn’t given a satisfactory response. The lastest outage caused my sites to be ‘off the air’ spasmodically during a 24 hour period. Once again, I was given an unsatisfactory explanation for this outage.

Not good enough Ausweb!

A Member of one of my sites, Yellow and Black suggested MD Web Hosting. I’ve opened a Reseller Account with them and am starting to move some of my personal sites to their servers. I’ve also moved one of my client sites (Melbourne Ultrasound for Women) to MD Web Hosting.

I’ll move the rest of my personal sites (except for Yellow and Black) to MD Web Hosting so I can determine their performance over the next 2 to 3 Months. Once I’m confident their service is better, I’ll move Yellow and Black to them and cancel Ausweb for good.

There is no change to my current Windows Hosts, Crystaltech and WebHost4Life. They’re both giving me great response times and very good uptime.