20/09/2006
And so after a solid week of coding and futzing around in Photoshop, I finally put the new Downtown Software House design up. I still might end up changing one or two things, but it works, and what’s important is that it looks much, much better than the old website. Good visual design is more important in OSX software than any other platform, and hopefully my website represents that a little better now.
If you’ve been here before, you might notice a new addition to my products page; Runner’s Log. I’ll be posting about it over the upcoming months, but I’m very excited about it. I’ve been using it myself for a few months now, and although it still has some rough spots, it’s starting to shape into the type of application that I myself would buy. Hopefully now that the site design is wrapped up, I’ll have some time to actually spend coding it!
17/09/2006
I’m just about done moving Downtown Software House and my other domains to my new host, 1&1. Switching hosts is always a pain; besides worrying about setting up new mailboxes and configuring my domains, I’ve had to import mySQL backups, rewrite some PHP code (1&1 doesn’t include all the PEAR modules I was using before) and generally poke around and hope I catch anything that might end up broken.
I won’t name names, but my last provider was simply terrible. Besides charging higher than average prices, they were horribly unreliable, had trouble with Macintosh .dmg disk images, and were prone to making configuration changes that broke my websites and email without any real warning. In short, it was completely unacceptable, and I should have stopped giving them money months ago.
After doing some research, the best choice I found was 1&1. Good prices, a long list of features, and they have a great reputation for reliability, which is always a complaint among the big names in shared hosting providers. Their website seems tailored to businesses rather than techies, but I’ve actually been very pleased with the in-depth management tools and configuration options they offer. For instance, managing multiple domains is a breeze to do, especially compared to my old provider where it took a trouble ticket and days to get anything done.
This is starting to sound like a paid commercial, but I’ve been very happy with their service so far, and felt a need to comment. Along with the move I’ve decided it’s finally time to some site re-design, so you’ll be seeing a few blog entries about that over the next few days.