Nov 6, 2011 by Paul White
Recently I was working on a new website for a client. When I got close to completion I checked to see how it looked across various browsers ( Firefox, IE, Chrome, Opera ). All looked great, then I tried to view it on my HTC Sensation ( Android 2.3.7 ). Normally when pulling up a website on my cell phone the browser will zoom out to fit the entire website into the width of the screen. Then you can drag the view around and use pinch to zoom to zoom into places you want to actually read. However on this new site I couldn't get it working. The solution was very easy. Click for details.
Oct 13, 2011 by Paul White
The Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts emailed me yesterday with a update of changes to the Texas State Tax Codes. As I glanced down this 16 page PDF, I noticed House Bill 1841 ( Effective Immediately ) Use of Internet Hosting Does Not Create Nexus.
"This bill provides that a person whose only activity in this state is as a user of Internet hosting is not engaged in business in Texas."
This tells me that I no longer have to charge sales tax to my out of state clients who host their websites with me. Awesome! However don't take my word for it. Texas Tax code is rather complex, and I plan to call tomorrow and ask the Texas Comptroller myself.
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Oct 4, 2011 by Paul White
If you need a datacenter to colocate your hardware, or if you need a really fast cloud, then I can't say enough good things about FastPCNetworks. I have colocated my server with them for about 1 1/2 years. The truth is you don't really know who you are hosting with until something goes wrong. Its not how they treat you when everything is up and running. Its about how they treat you when things go down. I have been with plenty of hosting companies. Before I brought my server to FastPCNetworks, I had been on Shared Hosting, VPS, dedicated, and cloud with some of the largest hosting companies in the world. Eventually after dealing with terrible technical support, and some of the cheapest hardware, I decided that it was about time I build and colocate my own server. At least that way when it goes down, I can fix it myself, instead of waiting for a ticket to make it to tech support days later.
Aug 29, 2011 by Paul White
To generate a little revenue from your blog or website google adsense is a great option. But when you an email from google with the subject of "Google Adsense ad serving has been disabled to your site", you suddenly find your only source of revenue gone.
This happened to me, but I was able to appeal this and get my Adsense ads turned back on. If you find yourself in this situation and are running borderline adult websites, here are some tips that might help you.
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Aug 26, 2011 by Paul White
When I built my blog over 6 years ago, I was just looking for a way to share my thoughts as well as maybe make a little money with google adsense. At first I was posting to my blog daily. Of course Adsense in the beginning doesn't pay crap. Maybe 20 cents / day. So after a while my motivations to post daily started to run dry. I didn't take the blog too serious until one of my articles went viral. When you write an article that catches on and spreads rapidly through the internet, you start to think about how things on the blog could be better. After all when 5000 people all hit your blog in one day, you start to wonder if that little optimization you have been putting off would have maybe resulted in a few extra clicks.
Aug 11, 2011 by Paul White
After building a CRM system for a company, we noticed that some of our marketing emails were hitting the Gmail's Spam folder. A little Trial and Error revealed some interesting facts about how Google's Spam Filter works.
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May 31, 2011 by Paul White
If your websites are going down, due to your application pool failing, or being automatically shut down after a few application errors, then you have a major problem on your hands. In my case the symptom was A process serving the application pool suffered a fatal communication error with the Windows Process Activation Service, in my system logs. If you have each website running in its own application pool then you know which website is going down, but the errors being displayed give you no hints as to the cause. I recently had a website that was randomly going down. Sometimes it would go down every few days, and other times it would only crash once a month. So I finally did some digging for the cause, and found it. If you don't know where to start in debugging your crashed application pools, this might help.
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May 17, 2011 by Paul White
Alexa has been around for a long time, these days many people tend to judge a site's worth by its alexa ranking. But the question is how accurate is Alexa's traffic stats? Since I do have my own server with over 40 sites, I have access to the traffic patterns of various sites. So in this article I will give you the stats so you can decide how much credibility alexa's traffic rankings really deserve.
Apr 13, 2011 by Paul White
After being colocated at Internap's Houston Datacenter with FastPCNet for 6 months I feel I have enough experience to give an honest review of the two companies, and their customer support. So if you have a server and are trying to find a
good great The Best datacenter to colocate it, Call John with Fast PC Networks. He will get you taken care of.
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Mar 22, 2011 by Paul White
This question is one of the most asked questions I hear from non IT people. Of course there is no 100% answer to this. But what we can do is go through all the different bottle necks in a server and its network, to figure out the theoretical maximum performance of a server.
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