Page Titles and Meta Tags

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This won’t be of much interest to most people, but I’ve released some new code that should improve the page titles and meta tags on the Car, Motorcycle and Mobile Phone sites.

For example, pages such as the search results and deletion requests pages are now marked as NOINDEX, so they shouldn’t pointlessly clutter up the search results of external search engines.

I’m also providing more relevant information in the meta description tags where appropriate.

Hopefully these improvements will result in more accurate external search results, and ultimately more visitors to my sites.

Coolwater Blackberry Boost

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Just enjoying a bottle of this rather nice beverage.

It’s a still mineral water that tastes vaguely of blackberries (a much underrated fruit in my opinion). So far so good, but it’s also very low in calories, and is fortified with caffeine to help with those long coding sessions.

Purchased at my local ASDA, so I assume it’s available in ASDA branches across the UK.

Benchmarks for Intel’s new four core processor

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Tom’s Hardware have benchmarks for Kentsfield, Intel’s new four core processor due later this year. Most applications don’t seem to be able to properly use four cores, but heavy multitasking and media encoding seem to really benefit. At the same time as Intel release Kentsfield, they’re also going to release Clovertown, a multiprocessor version for servers. Fingers crossed that these are available at a reasonable price by next Spring, and that Apple choose to offer them in the next update to the Mac Pro.

Coming back down to Earth for a moment, while I really like the idea of an 8 core Mac Pro, I do struggle to think of how I’d fully use 8 cores on a regular basis, and the chip does seem to be on the hot side. Just as important to me as power is having a quiet system, and two 100W+ processors are going to take a lot of cooling…

24 inch iMac

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I’ve just read details of the new iMac updates

I’m pretty impressed with the new 24 inch model. If I didn’t have my heart set on a 2nd generation Mac Pro running Leopard with virtualised Windows Vista and Ubuntu installs, on a 30 inch monitor, I’d be placing my order right now. Depending on the state of my finances next year, a speed bumped 24 inch iMac running Leopard would be a nice upgrade if I can’t justify or afford my dream Mac Pro set up.

Django and Ruby on Rails

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Over the last few weeks I’ve been taking a bit of a holiday (well as near as I ever get, which means I just work a few hours less than usual each day). One of the things I’ve been meaning to do over the last year or so is investigate the newer web frameworks, with a view to moving over to which ever one I prefer, as a replacement for PHP.

Reading around, I decided to install and play around with two of the most popular new frameworks – Django and Ruby on Rails. There’s already lots of comparisons between these two frameworks, but below are my thoughts having installed them and worked through their tutorials.

Django and Ruby on Rails compared to PHP:

  • Both push you into separating content from presentation, whereas PHP doesn’t try to help you impose any structure on your code. For larger projects, I’m sure this going to be a good thing
  • They both try to take you away from writing SQL. Instead you access the database through objects
  • Scaffolding in Rails and the Django admin interface help you get up and running very quickly
  • Implicit naming conventions are used in many places to transparently get data from one place to another. This avoids lots of tedious coding and potential mistakes

Good things about Django compare to Rails:

  • The free admin interface is very very slick. Much more powerful and elegant than Rail’s scaffolding. It’s something that you could give to end users with very little customisation
  • It’s supposed to scale better than Rails. A lot of the difference is probably because Python interpreter uses compiled bytecode, whereas Ruby does not have this facility in its current stable release
  • It’s written in Python, which seems to have better library support than Ruby at the moment
  • It seems to be biased towards content management systems, which is most what my websites are
  • Using Django would improve my Python, and Python seems to be used across a far wider set of domains than Ruby at the moment

Good things about Rails compared to Django:

  • Much easier to install. Making Django work on Mac OS X took me most of an afternoon, whereas Locomotive took only five minutes. I also found Rails installation instructions for Redhat Enterprise Linux 4, which will be very useful if I’m going to deploy a Rails application on my main webserver. I couldn’t find a similar document for Django
  • Rails works very well with my favourite text editor – TextMate
  • There are more tutorials and books available for Rails
  • Rails and Ruby just seemed more beautiful to me. I’ve written Python several times before, and while I admire it as a language, I just can’t get away with errors because of mixed spaces and tabs, and all the “self”ing and double underscores. Not the most rational of reasons, but if I’m going to spend many hours with a technology, it helps if significant aspects don’t irritate you
  • Rails seems to have more momentum than Django. If I’m going to switch to a new platform, I want to to have a good longterm future. That said, I think Django has a very positive future ahead of it too
  • Rails just seems to be about a year ahead of Django in terms of the slickness of the experience. Everything worked the way it should have done, where as Django felt like more of a work in progress

In summary, while I loved Django’s admin interface, its probable performance advantage, and the better availability of Python libraries, I’ve fallen for Ruby on Rails. This is mainly because of its elegance, and absence of any significant problems while installing and using it.

Switched my email from Yahoo! to Google Apps

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After over a year of using Yahoo! Mail Plus as for my Carsurvey email hosting, I’ve made the switch across to Google’s Apps for your Domain, and I’m very happy indeed.

First, let’s say some things about Yahoo Mail Plus

Good stuff:

  • They’ve always supported sending from your own domain, rather than the “user@gmail.com on behalf of user@domain” used by the standard Gmail service (not the Google Apps service that I’ve switched too)
  • They offer the ability to send SMS alerts to UK mobile phones based on certain criteria
  • They can query POP mail on other servers for you. Nice for mail aggregation if you can’t forward mails
  • The facility is offered to create temporary mailboxes to help avoid spam
  • I could download my archive of emails in a zip file, to take elsewhere

Not so good:

  • Their latest web interface doesn’t work on some browsers. Safari for example. So I was still using their old interface
  • I could never find an easy way to check my email on my mobile phone or PDA here in the UK
  • Their servers have gone down a few times, I’ve had people get bounce messages for my email
  • I was having to route my email through my web server, which mean that if that went down, I lost email too
  • The service cost £11.99 a year

Now for Google Apps

Good stuff:

  • Free – in fact I was given twenty five 2Gb accounts when I only asked for one. And while the service is still in Beta, anyone who signs up can expect that the basic service will stay free for them after it comes out of Beta
  • I was instantly approved for an account. No need to wait around for a few days
  • The interface is far more snappy than Yahoo! To be fair though, I’ve only been using the service a few days. I especially like the spellchecker (nicer than Yahoo!), and the way it automatically saves drafts for you as you work
  • Nice clean mobile interface
  • Email is routed to them via your DNS MX record, so there’s no need to route through another server. This should make things more reliable
  • I could load my old Yahoo! mail into Google. This took several hours using Google GMail Loader, and I got a few error messages, but I was pleased that it worked at all

Not so good:

  • Adverts, but these seem relevant and not too in your face
  • No option for UK SMS alerts. I never used this on Yahoo!, but I liked having the option available

More Mobile Phone Thoughts

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Following on from my post last week about my next mobile phone, details are appearing around another strong contender:

HTC Trinity

Basically this has all the good things I like about the HTC TyTN, minus the keyboard (not that big a deal for me), but with miniSD instead of microSD. miniSD only tops out at 2Gb at the moment, but you can already get 2Gb microSD cards, so surely a 4Gb miniSD can’t be too far away?

If I could get one of these on T-Mobile (UK), who seem to have the best 3G data tariffs at the moment, I’d be very tempted to lose the Dell Axim and go back to a single converged device.

Panic Over

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Right, the server is back, but the main reviews table wouldn’t mount back on the database. Thankfully, the “repair table” command from MySQL has fixed the problem and we don’t seem to have lost anything.

I’m going to spend some time checking over the site now. If anyone spots any problems, especially corrupt reviews or comments, please let me know.

I’ll be sending a complaint into my hosting company, as I’m not happy at all about how this has been handled. I’m willing to allow for some problems, but taking about five hours instead of one, getting the day of the change wrong, and corrupting the database are not acceptable. It’s a real shame, as I’ve been very happy with them up to now.

Server Update

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I’m not a happy bunny.

Not only has the disk replacement taken place a day too early (see my comment to the previous posting, but the rebuilding of the RAID array is taking way longer than intended. I was told the work would be completed in about 1/2 an hour, with one hour as the worst case. Not too big a deal on a Saturday morning. However, this is Friday, and after almost three hours of downtime, the rebuilding of the array is only about 50% complete!!!!

Sincere apologies to anyone wondering where Carsurvey.org etc have gone to. Unfortunately there’s little I can do other than wait for the rebuild to complete.