Christmas Fail

skoral    Family Life     christmas, photography

So we get the kids loaded up in the car and we head over to mom and dads house. The 15 minute car ride was no problem, and it was perfect timing because when we got there, the relatives were pulling in just as we were.

I helped unload the car that full of presents, and everyone got situated. Mom was making lunch and everyone was in good spirits.

Until…

Ji called me from the living room, not so much in a panic, but 1 of discovery. Apparently somehow for cameras have been left at our house. In there she was a photographer with no cameras! What was I to do, but offer to run home and grab the cameras for her. I had been the one who was responsible for breaking out all the bags in stuff that we were going to take, and somehow I had forgotton to bring her cameras. So here I am running home grabbing. the cameras, and I am reminded:

When you really love somebody, there isn’t much that you wouldn’t do for them.

Christmas Round 2

skoral    Family Life     christmas, family

Its Christmas all over again at the parents! The Extended family coming in to town.

Kids are excited and were getting ready to head over there. Before heading over, Ji set up the karoke app. Musical Mayhem ensued!

CloudFront / Cloudflare performance Comparison

skoral    Website Optimization     alienvps, cheap vps, cheap web host, cloudflare, cloudfront, WordPress

Just a quick post tonight before going to bed. I started two new websites. I wanted to see the difference between using the ‘power of the cloud’ versus normal website delivery times. What this means simply is that I created two sites, pretty much identical, with the only difference is that I used the Amazon CloudFront and CloudFlare on one, while the other does not use any cloud services.

CheapVPSreview.com – This is the website that I enhanced the performance of by using cloud services.

CheapWebHostNet.com – There are no cloud services that supplement delivery of this website.

Both sites run on the same Virtual Private Server (VPS) . My friend’s over at AlienVPS.com are supplying a 6-core, 2GB RAM / 40GB space VPS under the Warp3 VPS webhosting plan.

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Building Two Niche Sites

skoral    Wordpress Tutorials     Niche Sites

So over the past week, I have set up two brand new websites surrounding my children’s interests. They are similar sites, and the setup was exactly the same for both.

ProfessorLaytonGames.tk- This site is all about the “Professor Layton” game series for the Nintendo DS/DSi/3DS gaming platform. I gave a synopsis of each game and put links to purchasable products on every page, the sidebar and footer. Within 24 hours of going public, promoting on Facebook, Twitter and related forums, I made my first sale on a Pocoyo Plush doll!

PocoyoWorld.tk – The kids love watching the short animated cartoon “Pocoyo” on YouTube. Jin and I already knew that there were a number of products out there, so it was natural for me to do the same type of website for this niche subject. As of this post, the ‘Shell’ website is running, which means that the core content management system is installed, the site theme is complete, and the home page content is done (to some extent). I will be adding the rest of the content and products over the next couple nights (as schedule allows). The site will probably be done in less than 8 hours of work at night after the rest of the family is in bed.

How do you set up a site like these?

I am running all of these “mini-sites”, if you will, on a ridiculously small 190MB virtual private server (VPS), however, you could accomplish the same thing on a shared webhosting service. I recommend BlueHost for this as they are inexpensive and the setup is painless, and a single shared account can hold over 40 sites reliably (They promote the service as unlimited, and so far, I haven’t hit any limits – total account size is over 14GB in space!) I use WordPress as the base for building all of my personal sites. It is reliable, free and works with very little coding knowledge. There is a huge support community, and it can be configured to do almost anything you want.

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