live website creation and promotion

Finally moved all my sites to a new dedicated server, they should be stable now. Server is located at ThePlanet datacenter and performs thousand times better than previous virtual dedicated at GoDaddy (not mentioning other problems with GoDaddy that I got rid of now). Will start adding new features very soon.

Returning to Wiki post, I might choose Wiky, it suits better in my case (example).

( via )

Tried to install and configure IBM DB2 on our virtual dedicated server. It just doesn’t work well - half of operations were aborted due to memory limit. So we’re moving to 1and1 dedicated root server (Fedora Core 4, Plesk 8, 1Gb RAM, unlimited traffic). They have 2Gb RAM option as well, but I don’t think we will really need it soon, even though DB2 is not very lightweight software

P.S. DB2 is just fantastic, I’m able to do things that MySQL can only dream of, and it still works fast, despite of the fact that I didn’t set up any indexes yet - except of primary keys in tables.

Several days ago, all our websites were unaccessible from time to time, this problem is fixed now. Here’s the quote from Joker.com, company that we use to register our domains and for DNS support:

A distributed denial of service attack (DDoS) of unknown origin started Monday, 2006-03-20
…
Upstream providers reported traffic peaks of about 1.3 Gigabits per second on a single line. This was enough to overload our lines, causing communication problems between our border routers and the upstream providers, and thereby interrupting all services for a short period on 2006-03-20
…
We responded by adding more nameservers, some of them being hosted in external data centers with own DDoS protection. We reserved more bandwidth for Joker.com exlusively, and implemented automatic systems to react on certain incidents.
These measures seem to have helped, since the later attacks did not affect our systems as much as the first one. In the near future, we will do more to protect your domains and our business against such criminal activities.

We know Joker.com as a very reliable service for already 2 years of good work and recommend it highly.

I’m thinking about the idea to add personal page to each book author, movie actor and director, and so on (as well as adding a separate comments to all them). The question is - how to implement it? I vote for wiki. Then I need some wiki engine, that I can easily change for my needs - perfect variant would be if it has functions for working with database (database layer) that I can redefine - to use my users info instead of internal usebase, to store data in my database. Or even better - if I can take just the wiki-part (working with separate page, storing history) and use it alone, without all other functions. Does anybody know such wiki engine? Or maybe you have something else to suggest?

[I’ve already built such mini-wiki-engine for eMule Plus forum, but I prefer to use something more powerful if possible]

Update. I’ll probably look into TiddlyWiki first - when I get to this feature at all.

Somebody is trying to copy one of my projects…

I’m having constant problems with MySQL, it is very slow now, especially when there are dozens of search bots parsing my sites.
I also found it very annoying that simple subqueries take a lot of time to execute - it works about 10 times faster after I separate them and use two queries instead of one, passing the data from first to second via PHP script.
It appears to be a well-known problem for MySQL 4.1 - I’m not sure if that’s still happening with 5.0 version - but I don’t have too much time to make thorough tests, so I’m going to move to PostgreSQL, as it seems to be a much better solution. Right now my database code is not too complex (yet), so it won’t take long.
Any comments?

P.S. I understand that this move also means ideology change - things should be done with stored procedures, foreign keys, triggers and so on - so part of business logic is moving to DB. But actually this is exactly how it should be, IMHO.

Update. I’m seriously thinking about IBM’s DB2…

Added links to Google Reviews and Netflix for every movie at MyFilmz. Do you think there should be more useful links?

Update. How could I forgot IMDb?

My first experience with Rent A Coder was not so nice - the coder I chose to make a work has disappeared and I wasted some time with the arbitration process. But afterwards I reposted my project (coding new MyFilmz’s design to XHTML/CSS) and now you can see the results
I’m planning to use Rent A Coder from time to time and recommend it to others.

Added ratings to MyFilmz. All credits are going to Rogie King for his very nice CSS star rating code.

Right now you can’t do much except just give out your ratings to the movies, but I’m going to improve that and add sort by ratings, search by ratings and other things.

As well, ratings system will very soon be added to all my other projects.