Rodent Regatta

Complete with sponsors, rules and a deadline, there’s now a template design competition for Textpattern. Reviewing designs will be a great way to learn the details of Textpattern’s tags, forms, sections and pages.

If you’re a designer looking for new business, this might be an excellent community to support.

Many thanks to Tom Fadial for making it all happen!

Check the end of this entry called Edit 3 for an update on TextDrive specs. It seems that everybody participating in TextDrive’s various “VC” plans can now occupy 2GB of disk space with up to 15 domains and use 20GB of bandwidth per month.

My own interpretation of this says that someone who combined the VC200 with the VCII now has 4GB of space, can host 30 domains and possibly can use 40GB of bandwidth each month. This for single payments of $199 and $399 respectively. That’s $598 for a lifetime hosting arrangement.

As of this entry, similar specs would cost between $16 and $40 per month for shared hosting arrangements from popular hosts. Payback is sweet and takes only 15 to 37 months!

TextDrive

Below is a table that represents my best recollection and research concerning the various lifetime hosting arrangements provided by TextDrive. These are not meant to be binding or to put words in anyone’s mouth.

Disclaimer’s done. I also think there has been some shifting in the specs of the older arrangements as newer ones have been offered. Then, add a couple of these together and you get still another mix of specs. Finally, merge TextDrive into Joyent and a bit of additional updating happens. Here’s my take on the original offers, but watch for edits and updates:

Mo/Yr	Called	Price	Domains	Bandwidth	Space	db
05/04	VC200	$199	10	10GB	1GB	20
06/04	LHR1	$199	3	2GB	200MB	6
02/05	VCII	$399	15	20GB	1GB	20
09/05	VC3	$399	15	20GB	1GB	20
11/05	VC42	$399	10	10GB	2GB	20

Perhaps we’ll provide another table showing how each of these has been updated to newer specs.

EDIT 1: ¹LHR stands for Lifetime Hosting Redux and was briefly offered during June of 2004. That makes five offers of lifetime hosting—not four. ²VC4 is also known as The Mandelbrot.

EDIT 2: Corrected the date on the LHR from 2005 to 2004.

EDIT 3: On December 20, 2005, we got a spec for the VC accounts at TextDrive. These specs will henceforth be known as the Stairway to Heaven specs. Combine two or more and you’ll have an escalator.

Mint is a software product designed to help you determine how the web views your web site. It goes beyond mere referrer logs and groups information into meaningful blocks so that future design decisions can be more appropriately tuned to your audience.

This morning I made the update from Mint v1.14 to v.1.23. It wasn’t exactly gene-splicing, but it also took some time, some concentration and some care. Mint allows other software developers to add something called Peppers. These are like extensions or plugins that capture or sort web traffic information into other views.

There is still a bit of a task to determine which Peppers have been updated for the latest version of Pepper. They lag behind by hours, days or weeks. Then, the installation of these Peppers involves copying exactly the right files and folders into precisely the right places at the appropriate time.

Finished, it is worth the effort.

Buried in the bowels and intricacies of CSS and XHTML, I’ve been learning – slowly. Sidetracked by a bit of client work, I keep my eye on things like openoffice.org, Google, AJAX and Ruby on Rails.

If such matters interest you, there’s a repository that seems to have tentacles in all those directions. It’s called TextDrive. Going beyond basic hosting, it’s an educational institution and a thriving community. My enthusiasm for what these folks are doing grows. While you’re at it, check out Strongspace as well.

For an insiders view, look here for the real upside of what’s going on.

Now, back to these blasted div’s, id’s and classes. I still don’t get it.