Daily Technical

As you will notice, I have not written a post in this blog since February of ‘08 – nearly a year! When I started my blog (just over a year ago) I did so with the intention of focusing the content solely on Web Operations (my current day job) and only posting when I felt as though I had something of real value to share with everyone. As the year wore on, it felt as though the bulk of my web operations experience was pretty common, without real value, and that last thing I want to do is waste a reader’s time.

Considering it has been nearly a year between posts, it has proven to be a bit of a struggle to focus only on web ops with stories that I think will be relevant for the intended audience (it’s proven difficult for me anyway, not so much for Allspaw over at Kitchen Soap – good ops stuff there). So, I have decided to expand the scope of my blog. Rather than dedicate the blog entirely to web operations, I’ve decided to target a wider audience and talk about the role technology plays in my daily life as it has for the last … well, let’s just say quite a few years.

I have always considered myself a technology generalist. In my career I’ve held positions in various disciplines within the field. A few on the list are; hardware repairs (pc’s, printers, overhead projectors – long before whiteboards), network administration, development, infrastructure design, security and most recently, web operations. Given my geek history and realization of the fact that technology plays such an integral part of my daily life, I think it will be much easier – and hopefully more beneficial for prospective readers – to write meaningful posts about my experiences with technology in my day to day activities.

And so with that, barrfbag.com will now be called Daily Technical. And you can ask, but I really don’t know what I was thinking with the original name (not sure I love the new name either, but I guess ya gotta call it something).

I’ll leave you with one very useful item, the O’Reilly Velocity Web Performance and Operations conference is coming up on June 22 this summer. I attended their inaugural conference last year and it was well worth every penny. I highly recommend attending if you are able.

Brian

So I am about to begin migration for my company from host “A” to host “B”. This is not a co-lo setup, we are moving to a fully managed hosting environment. During this process (which began months ago) I’ve found a lack of documentation around migrating between hosting vendors. I found this surprising (unless I’m just not looking in the right places) considering that our setup is fairly common. Dozens of websites, a handful of 3rd party developers and of course, a handful of various server configurations dependent upon the application running on it. I have, however, found that certain small companies specialize in specific aspects of a hosting move, such as ensuring that all of your SQL DB’s are properly transferred and fully accounted for. But I have found no one that looks at the big picture.

I’m fully willing, able and have the staff in place to manage the migration in house (which is the road I’ve chosen) , but it would be reassuring to find a ‘checklist’ of sorts that confirms that we have thoroughly thought through all of the facets of the move. Would love to know if anyone has come across this sort of thing.

If all goes well – and I’m confident that it will – maybe I’ll post the list here if there is any interest…

I haven’t posted for a few days because I spent a little time in the very sunny, very warm, somewhat rural, Destin, Florida. Even though this was a short vacation, I still felt the need to get online. Unfortunately, a high speed wireless or wired connection (or any speed for that matter) was simply unavailable at the condo where I was staying. And in my 2007 mentality of having an always-on or always available high-speed internet connection at the ready practically anywhere I go, I believed that meant I was instantly powerless to get connected. Until my sis-in-law said ‘why don’t you just dial up?’ Duh.

It has been what feels like eons since I have used dialup to get online. But in my need for my internet fix, I didn’t hesitate to unplug the (completely unused) landline and plug in my modem (and pray that the driver for it was installed). It felt like eons waiting for sites as simple as my gmail account to load. Made me wonder what percentage of the online community is still utilizing dialup. An article over at Computerworld estimates that about 60 million Americans live in rural areas that don’t even have the option to purchase a high speed connection. This doesn’t even take into consideration the number of people that have the access to a broadband or DSL connection, but simply choose to not upgrade either because of cost, or due to their feeling that they don’t need it.

Although this may not specifically relate to web ops in the sense of technical operations, I became curious (partially because I am managing the redesign of one new website) and so I ran a few reports at my current job just see exactly how many visitors we receive that are utilizing dialup (as believed by the analytics tool we use). The total is roughly 10%. Considering the millions of uniques that we see each month, that is a surprisingly high number to me and could certainly have some impact to potential revenues. I’m curious what others out there see in the sites that they manage just for comparison…