Over the past year, we’ve helped launch over 20 new or refurbished websites. We’ve used just two hosting companies to host the majority of those sites.

1and1
We use 1and1 to purchase and manage all of our domains. At just ~$7 per year, it’s hard to beat. We also use 1and1’s Linux Business package to host the Stranger Studios website and a number of smaller internal websites. For just $9.99 per month, you get 250GB of storage space, 2500GB of bandwidth, and the ability to host up to 100 domains. If you don’t understand those numbers, just know that it is much more than need.

1and1 has great uptime. They offer both MS and Linux packages, including everything up to dedicated servers. In our experience, the packages below “business” level suffer from some performance issues, as there are a large number of websites running on the same server. However, the business packages have been great for sites of our that receive fewer than 1000 visitors per day. For sites that require greater performance or more flexibility, we suggest…

Myriad Network
WineLog.net is hosting on a Myriad Network Virtual Dedicated Server. People moving from a regular shared server to a VDS will notice a huge difference in performance. Another reason to look into VDS options is if your application requires databases larger than 100MB (1and1 and other shared hosts limit on MySQL DBs). Our Mobilicio.us application with hundreds of thousands of rows of data zings on a new Myriad Network server. And Myriad makes it easy to scale to multiple servers or larger dedicated servers.

When moving to a VDS, you’re going to have to do a lot more of the nitty gritty at the server level. For our clients, we handle all the nonsense. But even we get confused sometime with some of the more subtle aspects of running a server. In these cases, the Myriad support has been nothing but great with us. They are always timely in their responses and very helpful.

And, yes, those are affiliate links above. For over a year now, we’ve been referring clients and friends to both of these hosting companies without using affiliate links. A little bit of math showed us that we were leaving some money on the table here. Not a lot of money, but maybe enough for a trip to Vegas. So we appreciate your support by using the links above to sign up for these great companies. We wouldn’t recommend them unless we thought they were the best. And they are.

So we’ve jumped on the Facebook bandwagon a bit. You can now install the Interactive 8-Ball application to your Facebook profile.

Why would you want to install I8B on your Facebook profile?
I don’t know, but if you use Facebook as your homepage instead of iGoogle it’s nice to have I8B right there. We also update your profile and mini feed every time you ask a question through Facebook. Although this last bit can get tricky; we had a lady email us to take down a question she asked about a love prospect for fear of being had. (Which only gave us another idea for a Facebook app that we might share at some point.)

And What Happened?
I8B got a ton of traffic. In three days, we got 400 people to install the new application. Traffic to I8B trippled to 800 visits a day and then… leveled out. We actually lost 5-10 users today as people have started to uninstall the application. So growth is not exactly parabolic so far.

I guess we need something more to help the spread. (This blog post? A mention at TechCrunch? Maybe I’ll resubmit I8B to Emily Chang’s eHub.) It would be nice to have the 20,000 users that the other lame-o eight ball application on there has. Of course they got there first and so are high in the app directory and have the catchy URL at apps.facebook.com/eightball. (ours is apps.facebook.com/bettereightball)

What’s next?
A WineLog app for Facebook, duh. The I8B stuff was kind of a primer for work on a WineLog application. And good thing too. It is nice to work out all of the kinks using a brand that we aren’t as invested in. This article helped me a bunch, but it also took a lot of hacking around to figure out what he meant by everything. The toughest part was fixing Facebook’s broken PHP4 client. Don’t even try messing with that unofficial one. If anyone needs help, shoot me an email or IM.

Anyway, a WineLog app would be fun. Again, I would rather just go to WineLog to see what my friends are drinking. But if you spend your day at Facebook, it’s sweet to get notifications on what people are logging. And it will hopefully introduce WineLog to some new folks. Cross your fingers.

UPDATE: Here are links to my versions of the facebook api scripts. Download them and rename them to .php. I hope to comment up the code when I get a chance, so you can see what I changed. But in the meantime, this might be a better starting place for you than Facebook’s version.

facebook.php
facebookapi_php4_restlib.php
IsterXmlSimpleXMLImpl.php

Download all of the above files, rename them to .php, and follow the tutorial instructions here (or do whatever you’re doing). The strange one at the bottom is a library to handle XML objects (PHP5 does this natively I suppose). Read here for more on simplexml44. Or here is the entire simplexml gzip file as I unzipped and installed it on my server.

Way back, I wrote the tutorial on how to create a pagination scheme similar to the one that Digg uses. The code in the tutorial was meant to educate readers on how the algorithm works.

Meanwhile, I was using completely different code for my own projects. Typically I put all of the pagination code into a function (or PHP class), which makes it much easier to use in practice. Now I’ve made available a version of this function, which people should look to first if they want a quick implementation.

• Download the PHP code for the function here: diggstyle_function.txt.
• To use it make a function call like getPaginationString($page, $totalitems, $limit, $adjacents, $targetpage, $pagestring);.
• $page is the current page number
• $totalitems is the total number of items in the set. You usually get this from a SQL query.
• $adjacents is the number of page links to put adjacent to the current page.
• $targetpage is the URL you want to point to. e.g. index.php
• $pagetext is the string used to append the page variable to the URL. e.g. ?page= or &p=
• Use this style sheet.

Read the tutorial for more help and to see an example. For a real-live example, check out my Wine Log.

Also, Mis Algoritmos is at it again with a digg-style pagination plugin for Wordpress based on this code.

We are getting ready to release mobile access to WineLog. I wanted to pose a question around this, and I hope to get at least a few responses. So here goes…

What should we make the address for the WineLog mobile site?

Here are a few options. Feel free to come up with your own.

• http://winelog.mobi
• http://mobile.winelog.net
• http://mob.winelog.net
• http://winelog.net/mobile

We picked up the winelog.mobi domain a little while ago “just in case”. I’m not really a fan of the new top-level domain. Creating a separate subdomain for the mobile version seems much more elegant to me. Although, keeping the mobile site and regular site on different domains will help with traffic tracking and the such.

The effect on Google juice should also be taken into account though. By using a different top-level domain, we’ll be losing the Google ranking we’ve established. But maybe a .mobi address will help with mobile search engine ranking. I doubt it though since Google themselves aren’t using the .mobi domain. http://www.google.mobi redirects to http://www.google.com/mobile.

“mob” is quicker to type than “mobile” or “mobi”, so I’m pretty fond of mob.winelog.net. But I also want to keep to any standards that have been developing. My only experience with this so far is http://mobilicio.us, where we made the base site the mobile site and use http://mobilicio.us/www as the “project site” meant to be viewed from a larger screen. The mobile application was what people would want, so we put it right there at the root level. We did use the funny .us top-level domain to stay hip and remind people of the interaction with http://del.icio.us.

So I’m really looking forward to everyone’s opinions on this. Thanks in advance.

Earlier in the year, I wrote a tutorial on how to create pagination similar to Digg’s. The article focused on the basic algorithm for displaying the pagination, and there was definitely some opportunity for improvement in its implementation.

Well, the improvements are in. We have a modularized PHP version and a Perl version. See the updated pagination demo page for details.

Kim and I were getting a lot of work done on a new import tool for WineLog. There is no question that this tool is awesome. It is one-of-a-kind and will help users who have invested a lot of time into another wine tracking system to convert to WineLog. This new feature is good for our users, and good for the growth of WineLog.

However, there are a lot of existing features that could use our attention. The RSS feeds for instance need some help. Some are more flexible than others, some are not yet taking advantage of the smarter search code, and some are not working at all. There is a lot we can do to make subscribing to our content through RSS more user-friendly and easier to understand for folks who may not be familiar with Real Simple Syndication.

There are a lot of web sites moving into the wine space recently. Some of these web sites are really solid. While I think we currently offer the best mix of features and community, others are catching up fast. And their quality is not suffering. We can’t afford to have a reviewer say something like, “Sure, WineLog has a huge database of wines, but such and such a feature was rough around the edges and confused me.” We can’t afford to lose a user who runs into a problem like that.

For these reasons, over the next few weeks Kim and I will be focusing on making our current feature set as solid as possible before moving on to new things. Adding new features will only complicate things if we’re not sure that the current offerings are the best they can be. Sometimes we try to run faster than our legs can take us and we stumble a bit. When this happens, we need to slow down a bit and focus on our technique.

Below are a few “jokes” born out of the idiosyncrasies of communicating online. Also note that I’ve done every one of these at some time. I know I’m missing a bunch. So please add more in the comments.

1. Exclamation points!!!!1!!!1!!1one1!!!
I saw this one on Slashdot first (someone needs to do a blog post on general Slashdot humor). The “!1one” actually has an entry in the Urban Dictionary, which explains it pretty well:

Used in long uses of exclamation marks, the !1one is an intentional mistake that jokes about the appearance of numeral value “1″ in exclamation overdoses. This is due to the shift key not consistantly being pressed while tapping “1″ for the overused “!”’s. The intentional error may signify even more exclamation marks, like some kind of lunatic scientific notation. !1one may= !E9 or !*10^9, thus representing an absurd amount of exclamation.

2. Strike-through Jokes Joke Attempts
I imagine the practical origin of these jokes are real edits, where the author wanted to leave the original wording intact to denote the edit. However, a lot of strike-through “edits” are made before the first publishing with the intention of making a joke. Jokes like these are very similar to those in the “I’m not saying any names (Jason), but someone…” family. Here’s some strike-through action I did in an earlier post on this blog:

Kim and I are big fans of VistaPrint; their cheap inexpensive printing services help us save a ton of money for our clients.

3. Super-long Acronyms. ITLSDLATKOAYPTYA
Acronyms are great time savers in IM conversations. First there was ROTF, which stands for “rolling on the floor”. Then there was LMAO, which stands for “laughing my ass off”. And then some genius put them together to get, ROTFLMAO or “rolling on the floor laughing my ass off”. Acronyms as long as these encourage people to make up their own super-long acronyms. Mine above stands for “I’m talking like super-duper long acronymns. The kind of acronyms your parents told you about.” Next time you’re in an IM conversation with someone, try to throw a few of these super-longs in. It’s actually pretty amazing how well you can understand these, even when they’re made up on the fly.

4. Lots of links next to each other.
Another one I saw at Slashdot first. Excessive linking isn’t always meant as a joke, but there is often some humor with how the words connect to the material they are linking to. Chris Messina is one link-happy blogger who uses this technique a lot on his blog. Here are a few examples.

If you thought the heart was eye-catching, check out these screenshots of the Netflix homepage. That black arrow pointing at the previews tab blinks when you load the page. The gift box in the upper right has a cool animated glow/glitter effect on it. Nice stuff. Is it too much?

Michael Coffey, of Inertia Beverage Group, posted in November about the benefits of tricking your website out for the holidays. People are already in the shopping/spending mood, a little encouragment wouldn’t hurt.

It’s not too late. What changes can you make to your site? Will updating the Stranger Studios website help us get some new work?

While updating my Netflix queue today, I realized that they have changed the wording on their “recommendations” tab to “Movies You’ll Love”. They actually use a cute little heart image. I like it. I just had to click on it. Whereas before, I would only click on the recommendations tab when I was specifically looking for recommendations.

Language matters.

Maybe I should update the WineLog recommendations tab to “Wines You’ll Love” or something similar. I think I will work on the recommendation engine a bit more before making the change. I need to be more confident in the recommendations. There is a big difference between saying you’ll LOVE a wine and saying, “You might kind of like this wine more than other stuff.”

See CreativeCamp.org for more information. BarCampNYC2 was awesome, but the only reason we treked all the way up there was because Philadelphia-area entrepreneurs hadn’t yet gotten their act together. Well now Philly has an unconference of its own: CreativeCamp.

If you are going to be near (within 3000 miles) Philadelphia December 2nd, think about coming. It should be, well, awesome. I’m not sure yet what I’ll present on, but I’m thinking of doing something hands on. Maybe some microformats stuff. Who knows.

Spread the word.