Rourke McNamara

You would be hard-pressed to find negative comments or blog posts about pair’s shared hosting. Most people report that pair’s service is expensive, but worh the price. I was a user of said service for about six months, and agree with that sentiment.

The least expensive plan that allows you to host a dynamic site is $17.95/month. That price puts pair among the more expensive shared hosting providers out there. You don’t get anything fancy for that, but you can host as many sites as you want. A $5 setup fee is charged whenever you add new domains to your account. There’s no extra recurring charge if you share a single IP address across all of your domains, and only an additional $1/month for each extra dedicated IP. this is the best option I’ve come across if you need an IP address for each domain you host.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is about reuse. Period. All of the benefits people hope to see from SOA are derived from component-level reuse. The biggest barrier to this type of reuse is cultural, not technical. A proven way of rapidly inducing cultural and behavioral changes is through the use of KPIs or bonus incentives. I’ve recently seen two companies use exactly this technique to accelerate their evolution towards reuse cultures.

Motivate your IT architects and managers to reuse services by making such reuse a part of their bonus program. Reuse is a cooperative thing, and requires that both the provider and consumer are motivated. To further this cooperation, reward IT managers not only for reusing other services but also for having their services reused by others.

Liquidweb is fast, user friendly, and reliable. I would be a happy Liquidweb customer today if the basic shared hosting plan allowed customers to host more than three domains. I have not seen a single bad thing said about LW’s service and my experience was entirely positive. My experience showed this host be among the fastest and most reliable. At $14.95/month, service is less expensive than PAIR or MediaTemple, but more than most of the share hosting services out there.

I took a look at BigString after a reader of this blog pointed to them as a GMail alternative. BigString is a webmail provider with an interesting angle: when you send mail from BigString you have the option of making that email trackable, recallable, or editable. Even after you’ve hit send.

Everyone’s experienced the problem of an accidentally sent email. Maybe you fat fingered the send hotkey or maybe you pushed “reply all” when you really wanted to reply to just the sender. Panicked, you tried the “recall” function in Outlook, only to have a friend call and tell you that he now has two messages in his inbox — the one you accidentally sent and another one created by Outlook asking him to ignore the misfire.

I hate carrying cables around, but I also hate being unable to sync my iPod or connect an external drive to my laptop. Cables aren’t so bad if they’re short and well coiled, but who actually takes the time to recoil cables after each use? Retractable cables mean you don’t have to — thee cable does it for you.

I discovered retractable cables about a year ago and have had mixed luck with the first few I purchased. The retractable iPod cable I purchased from Belkin failed completely — first the cable wouldn’t stay out of the winder (didn’t click and stop), then the insulation pulled back from the end of the connector on one side. The first USB-A to Mini USB cable I purchased worked with with my Blackberry, but didn’t work with my portable hard drives.

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.