archive.Joe Lamantia.com

In busi­ness terms, I’d call the last sev­eral months of tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties with Unacom.net a bad ven­dor selec­tion and man­age­ment expe­ri­ence. From a more per­sonal per­spec­tive, it was frus­trat­ing, and a dis­ap­point­ment, since I’d wanted to add fresh con­tent to the site on a reg­u­lar basis after some trav­el­ling and start­ing a new full-time posi­tion before the win­ter hol­i­days.

Una­com charges lit­tle and deliv­ers less; for $80 per year, cus­tomers can count on receiv­ing badly con­fig­ured host­ing envi­ron­ments, poor sup­port and respon­sive­ness, and sub­stan­dard reli­a­bil­ity. I won’t cat­a­log their sins, but I will offer one exam­ple of the qual­ity of their offer­ing: sev­eral days ago their entire net­work went down — name­servers and all — for almost 24 hours, and a friend of mine who uses them to host his on-line order­ing and ful­fill­ment site had to do some ama­ture detec­tive work and call the owner’s *mother* in order to find out what was hap­pen­ing.

I sin­cerely hope my new host­ing ser­vice — APlus.net works out much bet­ter.

There are lots of lessons in this, but what struck me the most was the intan­gi­ble costs. I started look­ing at Una­com on the rec­om­men­da­tion of a friend who used them as a pre­ferred host for clients for some time, and is now severely embar­rassed when­ever the issue comes up.

I cer­tainly don’t hold him respons­ible for Unacom’s incom­pe­tence, but I know that he feels bad about the time and oppor­tu­nity wasted by the friends and clients who choose Una­com at least par­tially on the basis of his rec­om­men­da­tion. As a con­sul­tant, your liveli­hood depends on the cred­i­bilty of your rec­om­men­da­tions. And as a busi­ness, it depends on meet­ing the com­mitt­ments you make to cus­tomers — which Una­com doesn’t seem capa­ble of doing.

After a few long evenings (and lots of chmod…), JoeLamantia.com is now pow­ered by Move­able­Type 2.6. This marks a much-needed upgrade, since the older ver­sion ran on MT 1.4: it’s akin to mov­ing from sail to steam.

I’d orig­i­nally intended to move from 1.4 to 2.6 as a first step, and then imme­di­ately put a gen­uine CMS behind it — most likely Dru­pal — once the new blog core was sta­ble. But after all the trou­ble with Una­com, I’ve decided to just post for a while.

As an exper­i­ment, I’m going to use MT to man­age all the pages on the site, mean­ing that sta­tic pages and nav­i­ga­tion will grad­u­ally dis­ap­pear as I fold those sec­tions into the blog-managed systme of entries and cat­e­gories.

In the mean­time, I’ve per­suaded friends who are much bet­ter at devel­op­ment to exper­i­ment with Dru­pal, and report back to me on the install and tem­plat­ing sys­tems.

I looked at using a wiki for this pur­pose, but again I’ve decided to wait and see how this approach works out for some oth­ers. With ref­er­ence to the over-worn tech­nol­ogy adop­tion cycle graph (which is sec­ond only to Maslow’s Hier­ar­chy of Needs as the most abused exam­ple of a trite the­o­ret­i­cal simpi­fi­ca­tion of the inor­di­nate chaos of the real world used by those with­out expe­ri­ence as jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for spec­u­la­tive buseinss deci­sions), I sup­pose this strategem marks me as a “Insid­i­ous Vision­ary” more than an “Early Adopter”: I select a likely tool or solu­tion based on needs and trend analy­sis, and then con­vince oth­ers to actu­ally try it and see what hap­pens…

Unfor­tu­nately, the new lay­out looks like crap (again a tech­ni­cal term) in Opera and Mozilla for rea­sons unknown. There are no tables and posi­tion­ing as almost totally dri­ven by stylesheets. A deep and abid­ing resent­ment of the has­sles of deal­ing with browser incom­pa­biltity lead me to aban­don development-based roles in the mid­dle 90’s, so I’m going to just admit defeat on this point right now, and have done with it. Pend­ing the move to a new set of tem­plates in a new sys­tem, I’ll revisit the issue.