Today, I visited Alexa to check its ranking for my sites. The result, which I saw is that all the charts are going down straightly. I just thought because my site has lost visitors and became worry. However, after that I checked other sites such as Yahoo and Google but the result is the same.
Till now, Alexa ’s ranking is just considered as a less important factor to evaluate a site. Now, with this issue, the trust on it will be decrease even more.
Recently, I have moved all data and documents to my new upgraded desktop from my HP laptop. The reason is that day by day I need to work on graphic processing task, which require a big screen and high system requirement. And this is a great chance for me to try Ubutu. I was so interesting to play around with it for a long time, but because I can’t take a risk when I had only one machine to work.
Adobe has announced that it will release an online version of the most famous graphic editors all over the world, Photoshop Express. Actually, this project has been started when Adobe Premiere Express (YouTube Remixer) was introduced.
Like the Premier Expres, the online Photoshop is developed on Flex platform, which could bring us a Rich Internet Application. Generally, it would provide the users basic functions to edit, manipulate users’ images. I am not sure, but I guess it must be better than other Ajax-based services such as GIFWorks or myImager.
Actually, it can’t replace the original Photoshop or other ones. However, this will be a strategic plan of Adobe to penetrate the market for online applications, which has belonged to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft for along time. Will it be successful ? Let wait and see. I am really exciting to try this new thing.
Recently, I was in a big trouble when loosing contact with my network administrator in Singapore during the upgrade progress of the servers, and the result is almost my sites were stopped for about 2 weeks. The thing I could do at that time is temporarily move important sites to another server as soon as possible. However, the total size of them is hundred of megabytes and a 100-megabytes database, the connection speed in my country is still very slow to update and import the whole database to the new server if I still could use the hosting panel (CPanel or Plesk) as usual.
After some days in stress, I figured out how to move the big sites even the connection is very bad. All that I need is are two great tools WinSCP and SSH Secure Shell. More than that, they are free !
If you got WinSCP already, I have nothing to say, but if you are a webmaster and still did not know it, grab it immediately. This kind of SFTP/STP clients has full features to manage a dedicated server. In my case, I could use them to make a .tar file of my site, download it and then upload it to the new server, then unpack it easily. You could imagine how long I will spent if I download thousands files via FTP protocol ? With this great open source tool, I could have finished moving the whole site for more than 1 hour with a slow connection ( down/up: 55 Kbs/60Kbs )
The next step, I need to deal with the huge database, more than 100 MBs (50 Mbs in .tar file). That ’s stuck, almost hosting companies just allow you to import a 16MB file via phpMyAdmin or similar tools and mine just allow 2 MBs. The best solution is to upload the database file to the server, then connect via SSH protocol, finally use MySQL commands to import that file directly on the server. The progress will be done in minutes.
The final step is CHMOD the directories, config some php files to make sure the software could be compatible with the new server.
