Apr 26, 2008
As I mentioned in my last post, I have had issues getting Firebug working in Firefox 3.0b5. Unfortunately at the moment Firebug isn’t compatible with the beta release of Firefox 3. To be honest, I’m quite happy with Firefox 2.x. From what I’ve read, Firefox 3 is more stable and less memory-hungry that its predecessor, and it does look nice (especially so according to Mac users). Unfortunately, these benefits are outweighed by my love of the Firebug extension. It is, in my opinion, the best debug tool for web developers bar none. To that end, I’ve chosen to remove Firefox 3 (and all the bits and bobs that come with it) and install Firefox 2.
A few apt-gets later, I had got rid of Firefox-3 and related packages, and installed Firefox-2, symlinked to /usr/bin/firefox. However, Firefox-2 still used the profile created by Firefox-3 in my home directory. I started Firefox from the terminal, with the ‘-ProfileManager’ switch. I created a new profile, renamed default, and renamed my new profile to default. I then copied my bookmarks and related data from the old profile directory to the new one. Once this was done, I started Firefox with my new default profile, installed my favourite plugins and all was good - Firebug now works like a dream!
Jan 26, 2008
After some months of being unhappy with the service from Hostgator, I decided yesterday to move to Dreamhost. While Hostgator are very affordable and for the most part reliable, the ssh connection was always painfully slow; it took me considerable effort in the beginning to even get ssh access (having been required to justify my need to them); the control panel they provided (cPanel) made it difficult to get anything done; and as far as I know I could only host a single site with them.
After a recommendation from a colleague at work, I decided to switch to Dreamhost. I opted to pay for a year in advance, as the monthly direct-debit payments are a little more expensive otherwise, and there is an initial setup fee if you pay monthly. The control panel is far more intuitive and a lot easier to use. I can host as many sites and sub-domains as I like with as many users, email accounts and MySQL databases as I like. Once I had created the account and switched my name servers with my domain registrar everything was underway. Within half an hour I had shell access, an initial account with which I could create more accounts, an initial email address of my choosing (thus reducing email outage to a minimum) and a general impression that Dreamhost were a lot more professional and experienced.
Obviously it will take up to 48 hours for the new name server settings to propagate to the root name servers, but despite this within about four hours the name server change had been effective for me. After about 15 minutes work making changes to my local copy of my Wordpress installation and MySQL dump, I rsync-ed everything to the new server, got the database up and running, and job done!
May 19, 2007
Up until recently my hosting was provided by Fasthosts. For reasons that have nothing to do with the experience I have had with Fasthosts I have had to move to an alternative hosting provider. After some research I opted to go with Hostgator’s Baby plan. The features included with this hosting plan are excellent for the small fee of £5.00 per month. And the technical support is brilliant. I initially had problems getting SSH access, but after raising the issue via the ticket system, I had SSH access within a few emails! [Read more]
