My web host, TotalChoice Hosting, just doubled the bandwidth and storage space of all their plans. This is a good thing since space was starting to get a little cramped on my server. Now, I'm good to go for a few more years with 3GB of storage space and 140GB of monthly bandwidth.

I can't recommend TotalChoice Hosting enough. Just a little research and you'll come across hosting providers such as...picking just one example out of the ether...BlueHost which promises 1,500GB of storage space and 15,000GB of monthly transfer for just $6.95/month...*cough* *cough* bull droppings *cough* *cough*. So what's the catch...speed and/or CPU throttling. I've tried several hosts over the years and either their speeds are so ridiculously slow that you and the rest of the world together could never transfer your allotment or anytime your site gets a mildly busy period your visitors are greeted with a splash page stating, "This Account Has Exceeded Its CPU Quota." These sites might as well offer unlimited space and bandwidth because you aren't going to get to use either.

Anyway, I've never had any issues with TotalChoice Hosting. As you can tell, this site is very graphics intensive but always loads very quickly. Any delays are due to some third-party scripts I run (usually one of my stats providers). Just as, or perhaps more importantly, TotalChoice Hosting has the best customer support in the business. They have the most helpful forums run by many incredibly knowledgeable and helpful individuals who go out of their way to help members. Formal tech support is nothing less than amazing. The last support ticket I submitted was fixed in just three minutes. They didn't just respond in three minutes...they fixed it in three minutes! They also have a number of options for live tech support, which I haven't tried...since I haven't had that many problems.

Finally, TotalChoice Hosting is owned/run by Bill Kish known as the Head Guru who is always on the forums and available by email, AOL/Yahoo Messenger, ICQ and probably a bunch of other ways I've never bothered to explore. He's a normal guy who gets ticked at idiots and appears to really care about providing good quality, reliable hosting services at very competitive prices. TotalChoice Hosting has sponsored real life food and drink parties, given away computers and tech toys in contests and, otherwise, really makes the extra effort to provide a little more than other hosting providers.

The only caveat about TotalChoice Hosting is that they only allow one domain per hosting plan unless you get one of their more expensive "reseller" accounts. The industry standard seems to allow multiple add-on domains per plan. TotalChoice Hosting's restriction has required me to host a number of additional sites I have on a micro-account with A Small Orange where I can host unlimited sites which get very little traffic for just $25 a year. Even taking into consideration this minor annoyance, TotalChoice Hosting gets my highest recommendation for the best web host.

The upgrade to the software that runs this blog, Movable Type, to version 4.01 is complete. The new version includes an entirely new backend, the part that only I see. Probably the most noticeable thing to visitors is the calendar type date in each post's newly linked title. Beyond that, the changes/fixes/improvements include:

• Added top 10 "Most Commented Posts" in the left hand column.
• Elimination of pop-up commenting.
• Improved comment differentiation by alternating highlighting, indentation and numbering.
• Added "tags" to the ends of posts with themed search results page.
• New themed blog search results page.
• Fixed odd "Most Recent Comments" behavior on archives.
• Fixed number of trackbacks statistic.
• Cron job task scheduling (don't ask).
• Improved template efficiency and organization (invisible to you).

Thanks to Dan Wolfgang of uiNNOVATIONS for his invaluable assistance in making the upgrade and improvements. Dan is also the author of Better File Uploader one of the best plugins for Movable Type.

The site is in the midst of being upgraded to Movable Type 4.01 so there may be some minor glitches until everything is finished. Commenting is still open. More details upon completion.

Today the Danz Family blog is 3 years old. We've had the website since March 9, 2001, but didn't start the blog until June 10, 2004.

To date, there have been 454 entries, 1556 comments, 57 trackbacks, approximately a half-million visitors and a million page loads. Not a bad first three years. Thanks to all the commenters, viewers and linkers and to Drew and Will for making this so much fun.

Here's to the next three!

This past week I've been working on putting together a single-page temporary website (left) for a friend who is a patent attorney. The site is IndePatent.com, "patent advice for the independent inventor." Head on over there if you have a patent law question you'd like to get some free advice on.

I also worked on putting together a permanent website (right) for him. After trying a number of options and despite being a Movable Type user and advocate, I went with WordPress which just seemed easier to install and customize. It's not ready to go live yet, still working out some kinks and details, so only a thumbnail for now.

I acquired the domains Danz.net, Danz.biz and Danz.us two years ago, but I never found a web host to park them on that provided everything I wanted for a minimal fee. I am extremely pleased with the host of DanzFamily.com, TotalChoice Hosting, but they don't allow addon domains (adding multiple domains to a single account) which meant I would have had to purchase multiple accounts or a reseller account both of which were costly options. Long story short, Danz.net/biz/us are now being hosted with A Small Orange which provides a great full-featured "tiny" hosting package for just $25.00/year.

     

I haven't updated the various statistics/rankings for the DanzFamily.com in a long time so here you are:

Google Page Rank = 5

Google Backward Links = 1,240

TTLB Ecosystem Rank = 382 out of 58,090 blogs (Large Mammal).

Technorati Rank = 4,465 out of 57.4 million blogs.

Alexa Rank = 947,247 out of the entire interweb.

Number 1 on Yahoo search for Danz.

Number 2 on Google search for Danz, thanks to a darn New Zealand dance site.

Number 4 on MSN search for Danz, always knew they were worthless.

Finally, this past September 11, 2006, DanzFamily.com saw the highest single-day number of visitors (3024), page loads (6327), hits (264,811) and bandwidth (15.89 GB).

[Update I:] I just realized that the cool mouse-over effects I have for the images associated with Danz.net, Danz.us and Danz.biz above (as well as the ones in the left side-bar) aren't working for some reason. I hate computers. And, while I'm at it, the new Explorer 7 really sucks the big pumpkin something awful. And Firefox 2, while better, has its own maladies.

I'm off to live in a cabin in Montana...

[Update II:] Fixed the mouse-over effect, simplified the code and somehow eliminated the conflict so everything is working again. Not moving to Montana...but may still work out some kind of time-share deal.

As you can see, things were humming along very evenly until the 11th when my 9/11 hijackers image was widely circulated. Thanks to my great web host, TotalChoice Hosting, there was no slow down in performance despite the 20 times normal load on the servers.

It's not enough that Mike Hermes of Okiedoke.com is the driving force behind the 2006 Okie Blogger Round Up but he is also single handedly running the 2006 Okie Blog Awards recognizing outstanding Oklahoma Blogs in twelve categories: Overall, Political, Family, Humor, Audio, Layout, Unusual, Writing, Commentary, Culture, Inspirational and Commercial.

There are a lot of great nominees in all categories, most of which I hadn't read before, which is one of the best things about the awards...getting to know and, if they attend the Round Up, getting to meet other local bloggers.

Thanks to whoever was kind enough to nominate Danz Family for best Oklahoma family blog. Voting is open to all active Oklahoma bloggers until September 23. Winners will be announced at the Okie Blogger Round Up. I think I know who I'll vote for for Best Overall Blog, best Political Blog and Best Writing Blog. I'm still reading though the nominees in the other categories...great stuff.

Whoops!, sorry Firefox users. Looks like the YouTube video I posted of Jason McElwain causes problems with Firefox. While little glitches like that bug me to no end, I just don't have time to fix it right now as I'm working on too many other projects. I'll try and fix it in the next day or two. One of the projects which is competing for my time should be ready to go live this coming weekend.

[Update] The problem with Firefox and YouTube is fixed. I had an extra unnecessary snippet of code that was causing the problem.

Danzfamily.com will be down for maintenance for a few hours sometime late this Friday night through Saturday due to my hosting company switching datacenters. The upside is that by Saturday morning this site should load even faster and have even greater reliability.

My webhost can beat up your web host! TotalChoice Hosting, is upgrading their servers:

* Supermicro X6DVL-EG Dual Xeon Serverboard
* 64BIT 2x Intel 2.8Ghz / 800FSB / 2MB cache / EM64T / HT enabled CPU's
* 2x 160GIG SATA HD
* 3ware Escalade 8006-2LP RAID controller
* 1x 160GIG SATA HD

Their speed and uptime, which is already terrific, should only improve. If you are not satisfied with your hosting company, I highly recommend checking out TotalChoice Hosting.

Google released its Google Analytics service today which, if it is everything Google is hyping, should take over the web stats world in no time. It's designed to seamlessly integrate with Google AdWords* (advertisers) and with Google AdSense* (web publishers) but, in the process, may seriously dent or put out of business other web stat programs such as Site Meter and Extreme Tracking both of which I use myself.

Early this morning I signed up despite some difficulty due to heavy traffic. It is supposed to start providing analysis "within twelve hours." However, given the fact that almost every tech site has been talking about Analytics today, I'll bet it will be a day or two before reports start showing up with regularity. I'll post again with a review after everything is up and running smoothly.

[* Why in the world is the address of AdWords adwords/google.com/ while the address of AdSense is google.com/adsense/ ?]

Thanks to the assistance of the Orange Haired Boy, I finally got around to updating my blogging software to Movable Type 3.2 and fixing some bugs that had been, well, bugging me. Now if I can just figure out how MTPaginate works.

I'm no longer using the Blogrolling service to maintain any part of my blog rolls. Far too often problems with Blogrolling was the sole cause of the site refusing to load. All of my links are now hard-coded.

However, I will still continue to use the Blogrolling service to allow people to easily add Danzfamily.com to their blogrolls.

Blogroll Me!

The AIM Blog Change Bot service provided by Ben Hoskins is no more. I noticed it hadn't been working for a while and emailed and asked Ben if it was still running. Ben provided the following response:

Hi, Not anymore. Once the numbers became high enough, AOL weren't happy with the service and I could not get it 'authorized' by anyone at AOL. Sorry, Ben

I have added MSN Alerts service for messenger, mobile or hotmail accounts. (Public info, Blog sing-up.) Of course, Microsoft couldn't see fit to provide a standard rectangular 80x15 button, so I had to alter their 71x17 oval default button. After signing up to provide the MSN Alert service on my blog, I noticed there was no way to go back into the system and make any changes to the information I had provided. I responded back to the "Getting Started" email I received from Microsoft and got a same-day response which stated:

Hello Don, In the near future we will implement a Microsoft Passport login to the administration page. Access to the administration page will not be granted until the implementation of the Passport authentication is complete. In the meantime please feel free to contact either myself or bizdesk@microsoft.com for any modification requests you may have. Please let me know if you have any additional questions. Thanks. - Jim

As far as I can tell, the Passport login hasn't yet been implemented, so just be careful to not to make any mistakes if you sign up.

Well this is interesting, TagCloud:

TagCloud is an automated Folksonomy tool. Essentially, TagCloud searches any number of RSS feeds you specify, extracts keywords from the content and lists them according to prevalence within the RSS feeds. Clicking on the tag's link will display a list of all the article abstracts associated with that keyword.

It's basically a do it yourself Technorati tag display for your own blog. I don't think I'll be using it but it's kind of cool.

One year ago today, I put up the first posts on the Danz Family blog. I've maintained the Danzfamily.com website since 2002 and had some form of internet presence since 1998 (primarily through a now defunct fee service). This is my 180th entry. I've received 424 comments and 32 trackbacks from approximately 28,000 visitors (blog only).

Besides an introductory post, my first post was about the passing of President Ronald Reagan and the opportunity I had to meet him. The most popular post, by far, was about Sgt. Rafael Peralta and the incredible sacrifice he made while fighting in Iraq which has so far received 31 comments and several thousand visitors.

My better half now refers to my efforts here as my "scrapbooking" after I compared it to her real world scrapbooking hobby. I've greatly enjoyed the interaction I've had with my readers and the ability to keep family and friends updated. I'm looking forward to another year...