I am disgusted with the killers in today’s shooting on the Virginia Tech Campus. My sympathies and prayers go out to all who have been made victim in this in-humane offense committed toward all who are, have been, and will be a part of our United States Public and Private Education system. Many prayers for all the families and friends of those who have lost loved ones.

Virginia Tech Press Release Here

My most recent CMS piece was of course done on Joomla! However, this last round I took a minimalist approach on the back end. Typically I will try to include every component I believe the client may ever want to use. However, this time I stripped just about everything I possibly could out of the CMS installation. I also used two components I’d never used before. Both are of GREAT help in the menu making process. I suppose going forward I am going to take the approach of, “Only put it in if you need it.” Sure there is tons of things that look cool. But not all are actually useful. Also revolutionary for me was the process of creating my template from scratch. I didn’t start from any one else’s template. my CSS, my coding, the whole thing came from scratch. It has taken longer, but is far cleaner and efficient.

Part of the Grid Fixes was to change the way session variables are handled. Add this to your PHP.INI file in your ETC folder in the File Manager in your Account Center:
session.save_path = /home/11111111111111111/data/tmp

Where 111111111 is your domain folder path. It’ll save you hours of trying to re work your session code. :-)

So here I am in my 4 month of being on the Media Temple Grid. I switched to the Grid because of some ridiculous down times at 1AND1. When I first came to the Grid it was everything I could have ever wanted and more. However, as probably most know, there was a fair amount of troubles on the Grid. Most of these were due to MYSQL issues. The last upgrade was Grid Master Release 1.2. A lot of “intermittent” issues occurring on the Grid have cleared up since. I’ve thrown a couple of my Grid sites under http://mon.itor.us/. I’ve noticed a HUGE increase in uptime and response times. Right now on the Grid I’m averaging 160ms response times. This can be compared against some of my client’s old 1AND1 sites that sit around 950-1200ms. (Side note, Dreamhost is averaging 130ms http://joshyee.com/ <- My friend’s site).

My trust in Media Temple’s Grid Servers is slowly but surely increasing. Thanks for your continued effort MT! Lovin it!