Rourke McNamara

After a year of sporadic blog posts, rourkem.com was very personal, but very random. It lacked focus. Were I a reader of this site, I couldn’t imagine staying subscribed when posts included information on SOA, web service provider reviews, and pasta recipes.

There are a number of great articles out there singing the merits of the focused blog. Those articles have merit, but aren’t 100% applicable — this is a personal site and a personal blog. I’m not trying to make money with rourkem.com. I simply want to share reviews I write and to share my experience with new services and new technologies. I want a place I can post recipes and food commentary for future reference. I want to write about concepts and ideas that I think friends or colleagues might be interested in.

As part of a site overhaul, I moved from date-based permalinks to category-based permalinks. I did this to segment the site by top-level categories, and to improve search engine friendliness. Many people argue that this is a superior permalink structure, but very few point out the downsides.

Broken URLs are the single biggest problem. The initial change isn’t a big deal. I used Dean Lee’s Permalinks Migration plugin to redirect all the old URLs to the appropriate new URLs. Watch out, though: whenever you change a category you will end up with a broken URL that’s the above plug-in does not fix. Also, if you change the name of one of your categories, all of the posts under that category will have changed URLs.

I wanted to like TextDrive. I really did. They have an active online community. They have an amazing range of services available so your hosting solution can easily grow with your needs. They’re endorsed by David Heinemeier Hansson, creator of Ruby on Rails. Unfortunately, my experience with TextDrive was awful.

Dreammhost is a great value as long as you know what you’re buying. For less than six dollars a month you get a fully-featured shared hosting account with extremely generous storage and bandwith limits. Understand, though, that you are not getting a fast or reliable web host.

THE GOOD: Dreamhost accounts have every feature you could imagine. FTP, SSH, and secure email are all supported. The latest versions of Perl, PHP, MySQL, and Python are there, as you’d expect. Ruby on Rails is also available and fully suported. Beyond the above, expected feature, Dreamhost also offers Subversion repositories, streaming media servers, Jabber servers, and more.

Services cost quite a bit to create and deploy, but they are also expensive to maintain and scale. It is very tempting to audit the use of services and charge-back to the departments that are reusing your services. This approach can be very successful in an established, enterprise-scale SOA but it can be disastrous in a company’s early SOA years.

PicLens is a plug-in for Safari and Firefox that adds full screen slideshows to a variety of popular online photo sharing sites. This is a great idea. The problem is, it doesn’t work very well.

I installed the plugin and went straight to the photo sharing site that most of my friends use, Smugmug. Piclens doesn’t work with Smugmug because they only support a list of six specific sites or any website using auto-discoverable Media RSS feeds. I couldn’t find any photo sharing site or software package using Media RSS, though all of the sites I checked are publishing some form of RSS feeds with image URLs.