Free Couch in Sacramento or not to Free Couch in Sacramento. You’re gonna hate me. But I don’t have a free couch in Sacramento. I want to see how high this will rank as opposed to Craigslist. Craigslist of course comes up first when you query “Free Couch Sacramento” as it stands. This is only an experiment. You can comment below if you think this is an evil test. Thanks for reading!

So 26AM Design Studio (my company) recently started working on a site for a client that hosts with iPowerWeb. iPowerweb is definitely not the worst web host i’ve been on. However it’s not the best web host i’ve been on either. First off, they have some wierd email problems. Emails do get through to their system, however any incoming mail still sends the sender a “recipient did not receive this email” message.

Secondly, their control panel interface is not super straight forward. I realize they just upgraded to their new VDeck, but it still doesn’t feel intuitive. Getting around the interface is a little clunky. It’d be nice to see some drop down menus so you can get to and from anywhere to anywhere in the interface in one click without having to click the back button to get back to another part of the site.

I haven’t seen them go down yet. So I guess uptime is good.

iPowerWeb.com does have a good feature set and most common scripts/apps work out of the box (ala. Joomla, Drupal, osCommerce.)
iPowerWeb Support SUCKS! I was on hold for 45 minutes and still did not reach an agent. I finally hung up and gave up. It’s not just me. I finally told my client to call them on his own. He had the same prob. I suspect we’ll migrate them to MediaTemple in the next month or so. We’ll see. I can’t believe I’m going to write this. But I’d probably choose 1AND1 over iPowerWeb.

In the world of cheap web hosting, it’s hard to say if I’d rather take good support + okay uptime over features and POOR support. I’d say settle for neither and pay a bit more for a better host (ala. MediaTemple, Pair Networks, SliceHost). However if you’re on a budget and have a low traffic website, find someone else. Just find some decent support.

Okay thats all for now.

So I do a lot of CSS writing and HTML writing all day. Drop down menus are crucial to my web designs. I’ve used drop down menus on my sites countless times. I’ll be honest, most of the time I run out and download some cheesy script from some site like Web.Developer. Anyways, CSS Drop down menus are supposedly the best option. And I’d say I agree because they are universally accessible to all browsers (6.0/1.0). So I went out looking today as usual for a CSS Drop down menu script. I came across SuckerFish from A List Apart. I also found “Son of SuckerFish.” Score!

How to make the menu, you can read about here: http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/

My big thing was finding a menu that could successfully appear above embedded Flash Files. For years I’ve battled this problem. So here is my fix to the whole problem.

1. Drop in the following tags into your embed for your SWF.

< param name="wmode" value="transparent" / >and also add wmode=”transparent” to your embed tag ( and everything between it and . Further, delete the < noscript > tags. However leave everything in tact in-between those tags. For some reason, when Javascript is being used to embed the Flash, problems happen. When you remove the Javascript and use < object > + < param / >+ = Perfect!!!

So there you have it. My guide to using CSS Drop Downs via Suckerfish and Flash to be friends and play nicely!

So, a few weeks ago I was at a friend’s house who was picking up “free” wi-fi from some near by source. But as it goes with weak signals, it kept coming on and off. So I decided to offer him my HighGain D-Link WIFI antenna to try. So we brought it over to his house, plugged the antenna into his usb WIFI adapter. We saw his signal go from 5-12% up to 55%. Obviously, the signal was plenty strong to connect to this “free” wifi source and browse the internet.

I haven’t tried other supposed HIGH-Gain Antennas. However, I can assure you this one works. D-LINK http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=325

I am curious to see if there is a way to boost my laptop’s antenna’s. The Antennas of course are built into the laptop.

Travel Blogs are plentious out there. So are Travel Deal and Travel Everythings. But Because I recently helped my fiance get her TourToTheMax website up. How hard is it to get hits for her. I get quite a few hits on this site. So much that someone emailed to ask me if he could advertise on here. So if you have a blog or whatever about travel. How hard is it to get noticed in the sea of Travel Blogness?

Along the lines of travel blogs and deals…does anyone have any feedback about overseas honey moon locations? I’d love to hear some thoughts and ideas.

Okay, so this week I’ve had my share of frustration installing an SSL Certificate on MediaTemple GS. As usual the solution was a simple one, but the frustration was definitely frustrating. I really like GoDaddy SSL Certificates for the obvious fact that they’re CHEAP! 256 Bit for $29.99 is a price that can’t be beat. But installation onto MediaTemple isn’t as obvious. After following the directions in the MediaTemple SSL guide, the cert did go in, however browser’s weren’t liking it and as a result popped up with “Invalid/Unrecognized Certificate” errors. Not good of course, especially in a professional environment. After calling MediaTemple several times and each support rep insisting that it was just a DNS propogation thing, I waited for the full 48 hours. Of course during those 48 hours I was frustrated and unconvinced. I use OpenDNS which updates within a few minutes.

At last, a support rep at MediaTemple told me I needed to install the Chain Certificate because there was a browser compatibility issue with the certificate. Problem solved! Thanks last support rep! Hopefully MediaTemple will update the docs to include the specific instructions for GoDaddy certs.

You can get the GoDaddy chain files here:

https://certificates.godaddy.com/Repository.go

If you’re using their cheapest option, the chain file you need is titled: gd_bundle.crt

You’ll want to save the file and open it with some text editor, copy all the text and paste it into the appropriate box in your MediaTemple Account Center.

Cheers! Happy SSLing!