And I’m likin’ it. I spent many years at Pair. No complaints, really. I had a commerce account for around $50/mo. It was always up; it was always fast. It came with a shell account, rare for a webhost when I first signed up in 1996. They run their own news servers and the community there is top notch and knowledgeable. A lot of old timers there. In the end, my ecommerce sites were getting busy and I felt that I really needed to run database-driven sites. I mean, one of the sites I had on Pair had 5000 products in it. All static HTML!! Updating? Can you spell nightmare? I knew you could. Trouble is, I was afraid my account on a shared server might not handle the extra cpu cycles that databases would incur. I kind of needed a VPS or a dedicated server. Those options on Pair cost a fortune. Plus, Pair didn’t offer as many bells and whistles as other hosts, even though they were top of the line in 1996. I understand they have greatly upgraded their offerings, so it’s worth checking them out; they’re a real good company.

My first search ended up at Cloudweb.com. I liked them a lot. Their shared hosting seemed undersold, so I tried that at first. They had a good-sounding Reseller plan where I could put a bunch of my different accounts on, and it was quite inexpensive, with a lot of disk and bandwidth, whm, cpanel, lots of bells and whistles. Support was great. They’re a small company and easy to work with. My first database shop was for my big-un, the one with 5000 products and I tried Prestashop (continuing to run my html site while I built the new one). Unfortunately, it ran slow. They had some good prices on VPS hosting, but they were unmanaged. I can work with “unmanaged”, but if I screw something up and my $-making site is down, I want SUPPORT!! I’m not that much of a gambler on my dark-side skills.

Next stop, Hostgator. Scary sounding “commercial” name, but they got rave reviews (along with Blue Host) in the Prestashop forums. With Prestashop, the best (and free) ecommerce software I’ve ever seen, a big site like mine needs occasional server tweaking, and the people at Hostgator know Prestashop inside and out.

Anyway, at Hostgator I first tried a Business account on a shared server. A lot of Prestashop users use this extremely affordable hosting ($10/month) with no problems. It comes with super bells and whistles, whm, cpanel, shell account (I think on the shell acct – memory could be wrong). Lots and lots of support How-Tos for all you nervous web developer types (you know who you are!) Everything was great. My ecommerce sites which ran fewer than 100 products, (custombelt, lizardonline) were super fast., except as I got more and more of those 5000 products added to the big site, it slowed down.

Support is really great at Hostgator so I stayed there and moved over to a VPS (virtually private server for those of you…oh you know who you are…), which was very affordable. Geez. I’m really happy there. (I’m easy. Give me a good server and I’m happy, don’t need no pills er therapee.) Anyway, all my sites were super fast there as usual, except for the big-un. Grrrrrr. I’d better do a long-story-short here. That big-un was slow, it turns out, because Prestashop has a Category module which tries to load every product in the category every time you click on a different one. I found that when categories got to more than 100 products, it started to crawl. I tried a lot of work-arounds, but as it turned out, the very smart developers at Prestashop changed the core so that the category slowness didn’t happen. For those who want to try Prestashop, the Very Excellent Version is 1.4.9. I have tried the new upgrade in the 1.5 series and it’s really a great upgrade, but so far I’ve tried it on 1 shop, a small shop. I’m leaving the Big-Un on 1.4.9 because it ain’t broke, so it don’t need fixin’. 1.5 is pretty cool, but I’ll get into that in another post. One of the cool things is, you can develop several different shops with different domains and only one back end. You can even use the same categories and products on each of the several shops. Very, very cool, but I’d better quit before boredom sets in.

That’s all fer now folks!

Okay, you need SSL or you wouldn’t be looking. The easy way, you could ask your web host to do it for you. Most of them will; sometimes there’s a small charge.

But doing it yourself is fairly easy if you have a cpanel which came with your hosting account, along with a WHM (Web Host Manager?)

First, you have to get a dedicated IP address from your host. They run around $2/month from your host and they will set it up for you. Once you have the IP address you go into your WHM and click on SSL/TLS. From there you click on “Generate an SSL Certificate & Signing Request. You fill out a short form with your name, address, company address, etc. It should be the same information you would find if you ran a WHOIS on the domain name you want the SSL Certificate for. The last item on the form is your email address. Then click Create.

Next, you will be presented with three groups of code. The first group is the Signing Request. You will need that for when you buy the SSL Certificate. The third group of code is the Private Key. You need to save that for later. You can copy/paste everything to Notepad from there, or wait for the email to come. When the email comes with the Certificate Signing Request and Private Key, save it, it’s important. I keep an SSL folder in my email so I don’t lose it.

Then it’s time to buy the certificate. Yes, it can get pricey. Godaddy sells them for around $59. $50 to $70 is common. If you want a wildcard certificate (meaning you can use it for subdomains like ssl.yourdomain.com.) they start at over $100/year. I have been using Comodo certificates for a while now and they work pretty well; no problems at all on any of my sites. I found a source called namecheap.com which sells Comodo certificates starting under $10/year. I usually buy the $29 ones, but the one cheap one I have has been fine also.

Okay, say you’re using namecheap, you will place your order for your certificate next and an empty window will come up where you paste the Certificate and Signing Request you generated earlier. You can copy it right out of the email you received from your host. Remember, you only want to copy and paste the Certificate and Signing Request. (The Private Key and the other certificate are for later.)

Once you’ve pasted it in, you click Submit and wait to see that it went through correctly. If it did, then you will wait for 15 minutes or so to receive an email from Namecheap or whoever you’re buying it from to click a link and verify some code to tell them that you are legit. After that goes through, you wait maybe a half hour longer and your certificate arrives attached to the email in a .zip file. Extract that to a folder in preparation for your next step.

Now you go back into your WHM, whm.yoursite.com. Click on SSL/TLS again and this time click “Install an SSL Certificate and setup the Domain”.

You will see 3 blank boxes. In the first one, paste in your domain’s SSL certificate which you just bought. The file will be called something like ssl_yourdomain_com.crt. Paste that into that first empty block.

For the second empty block, you need your .key file, which came with the original email from your server and which I told you not to lose. You copy only the *.key code and paste that into the second block. Then you read on the third block that it wants something called a CA-Bundle. You’ll find that in the email you received from Namecheap. Paste that in that third block.

After all that pasting click on the Submit button at the top of the page. Hopefully you will see a Success! message.

You’re finished. Then, depending on the application you wanted the SSL certificate for, you will start seeing those web pages coming up with the https:// and the lock icon showing. You might have to tell that web application somewhere in the admin area where it should look for SSL. It might be the same as www.yourdomain.com, or you might have placed it in a subdomain like ssl.yourdomain.com.

Disclaimer: I really just installed it on one machine because I was bored. I expected to hate it; then I would get an opportunity to re-install Win-7 on that machine.

The installation: way easier and quicker than any other windows OS. Possibly it is even easier than Ubuntu! “Hal, do you just know everything?” “No, Burro, I just know more than you do.” Weirdly enough, I couldn’t get it to install from dvd (within Windows) on the first win-7 machine, so I boot-installed it. When it came to the “What would you like to keep, Burro?” question, the choices it left me were Nothing and Zip. I could choose Nothing or I could abort. I ended up choosing Nothing and it installed. In 15 minutes? Yeah, in 15 minutes. I quickly reinstalled all my apps. I was a little nervous on the Adobe Creative Suite (you know how Adobe is!) but it all activated just fine.

On the second computer, I went right to the boot install and it actually gave me the choice of “Keep all your apps and settings” as well as “Nothing”. I chose “keep all my stuff” and it told me to install from within Windows. When I booted in, Hal asked, “Would you like to take up where you left off?”. I clicked “Yes” and it installed, again in just a few minutes (okay, ssd drives do make things a little faster than normal) Hal asked, “Burro, just what do you really consider normal?”. (I’m working on a new novel called “Burro Shrugged”.)

After the reboot, OMG, everything was still there and everything still worked. Naturally, all my stuff was located on other drives, so I could immediately delete Windows.Old. What surprised me was that all my symbolic links to said stuff still worked.

Deleting Windows.old. Uh, you can’t. You get permission crap. The workaround is, you have to go to Explorer and click on the C: drive. At the top of the explorer pane is a new tab called Drive Tools. You click Cleanup from there. It will show you just the basic temp file stuff until you click the System Files button. Then you can go in and select “Old Windows Installations”. That cleared 15 gb off my SSD drive.

The Good: 1. Everything you use can be put on the one Start Page. Anything you don’t use much, like services.msc, etc. you just slide your mouse to the upper right corner, click on the ? and start typing. Or, they have all your apps listed by category. “Pretty good, Hal”. “Thank you Burro. We try to focus on the lowest common denominator. I’m glad it’s working for you.” 2. Your former desktop is now just an app that you click. If you like it, you can click it all day; or you can reinstall Win-7 or XP. It works the same, except that the start button is missing. Trust me, you don’t need it. Which is good, because from what I read, Microsoft has made it nearly impossible to hack in a start button. They figure idiots who need start buttons can just click around windows xp to their hearts content. 3. The speed. Uh, seems the same to me. I read that some things, like google chrome, are faster on Win 8 and other things, like graphics rendering are slightly slower. I can’t tell the difference. 4. Antivirus. You can’t use Microsoft Security Essentials, because Windows Defender already has it as part of its program and it’s pre-loaded. If you really like AVG or Norton, etc., you can install it and Windows Defender lets it run as your first line of defense.

I’ll add more stuff as I go. I haven’t found anything Ugly yet. I’m sure I will. Oh, the latest 64 bit drivers for my 10 year old scanner no longer function on Windows 8. That’s why I keep an old machine around the LAN running XP. So actually, with the scanner gone, my desk is now Less Ugly.

I received yet another email to my gmail account meant for another person.

At least they’re starting to get interesting, I guess. More interesting that car ads from other states and “unclassified” military information and attorney’s’ documents that I’ve frankly given up sending back with a “ya’ve got the wrong email address” explanation.

“Am at fcso now doing a register after jail release. I can call if you want… Just noticed that a long typed message I sent you yesterday didn’t send as I tried to txt to ur email address…jeez! Then I just erased accidentally. Have errands to run but call if you have phone time.”

I don’t know what fsco is. I don’t think I have any interest in finding out.

“And when he wanted to go back, down to earth,
the earth was an overturned piss pot
And he was all alone…”
Tom Waits – Children’s Story

Here we go again, back to Boston in another life, when I was a waiter at one of the restaurants there and had a friend named Jack.

Jack was a waiter too, but he always seemed to be on the edge of getting fired. Somehow he managed to stay, though, week after week and month after month. Jack was always very entertaining, in between customers, lots of jokes and stories. Smoking cigarettes, stealing food, laughing. We made pretty decent money there, but Jack was always broke and switching apartments.

Every night after work, we’d all go out on the town. 11:30 pm to 5:00 am was party time. Then we’d get up the next afternoon in time for work. Lots of times after work I’d be standing at the bar gabbing to Jim, the head of Jack’s crew.

“Look at Jack”, he’d say, “Can’t afford a pot to piss in and there he is buying drinks for the house…”

Sure enough, Jack would be there laughing and slapping…
“Waddayou drinkin’ man? Johnny, set em up! Suzy, git over here! Wadda ya drinkin’? Haw Haw!”

Jack and I worked the same job and made the same money. Even with all the late nights, I had so much I didn’t know what to do with it and had to stick it in a savings account. Jack was always broke. One time after yet another eviction, Jack needed a place to stay. I had a summer rental on the Cape so I told Jack he could stay in my basement apartment in Cambridge. When I got back a couple months later, my window was opened and the tv was gone. I said, “Jack, you left my damned window open!” “Oh”, he said, “I’m sorry man.”

A few weeks later he came over to me at work, grinning from ear to ear. “Hey man, I just quit! I’m outta here! I’ve got this great job starting tomorrow. We drive around different states and when we get to a town, we all get out and sell stuff. Then we get back in the car and go to the next town. It’s all expenses paid! I’m gonna be rich!”

“Uh”, I said, “You already quit?” “Yeah!” said Jack. “I’m outta here!”

“Well, good luck then.” I said. “Call me when you’re in town.”

I never saw Jack again, but I never forgot him, you had to give him that much.

Whatever he’s doing, I hope he still has his sense of humor. I hope he still likes to take chances.

And I kind of wonder if he was ever able to afford that piss pot.

Since I don’t really need the 20 mb cable connection for internet, and I’ve used up all my promo prices with Comcast, I thought, “Hey, I could see what my old host Mindspring has to offer!”. Put in my address….low and behold, I qualify for a 56kb connection, which was very speedy about 15 years ago, but now? Nah, I’ll keep paying the cable company. Geez.

Okay, here we are with the same ol’ stock WordPress theme. Eventually we will tinker with it, but for now Prestashop and our new VPS are consuming all the time available. (we’re even too damned busy to make the links affiliate links).

We stuck with Pair Networks for around 15 years. They were perfect back in ’96, and as far as I can tell, they still are, pretty much. They’re just way too expensive and don’t offer all the add-ons that the new kids on the hosting block are coming up with. And a lot of the add-ons they do offer are expensive, while the new kids offer them for free. But enough of that; they’re a good host; I just moved on, maybe I got bored.

The first host I moved to was Cloud Web. Actually, I’m still there. They use a “cloud based software” on their servers, which as far as I can tell, your site is spread over several servers, possibly in virtual environments. If something crashes a server, your site is still up. Basically, for my money, their quality is great, their support is top-notch, their price is cheap and my sites are always up. It’s still a shared environment, but what the hell? It “just works”.

My larger site (2000 products on static pages) seemed to work fine on Cloudweb, but I was nervous that it was just too cheap for such a big site. I was rebuilding the site in a subdirectory using Prestashop, and I worried that I’d end up with a slow database full of 2000 products on a shared server. They offer very inexpensive VPS packages, but they’re unmanaged. Not that I mind “unmanaged” when it comes to my office servers (uh, I’m the manager) but for my main business site? Yikes.

So for the larger site, I took a queue from the Prestashop forums and tried out a fully manged VPS on Hostgator. The name “hostgator” and the tacky gator cartoons turned me off in the past, but in the Prestashop forums, everyone seems to like them for a Prestashop host. What the hell; I use “godaddy” for my domains. So what? I’ve gone tacky; (I used to just be sleezy).

Anyway, I’ve got 30 gigs of space, 2.4 gigs of processor and .75 gigs of RAM for ~$50/mo. I actually tried their business package first, around $11/mo with a Free SSL Certificate (!!!) but I got nervous about the shared server thing. So now I’m on a VPS. I’m root (the power, the power), I can create new sites with new cpanels and we be super fast. My other smaller sites are doing fine on Cloudweb, so I’m leaving them. My big site’s got a big fast home. I should mention, and this shocked the hell out of me, both Cloudweb and Hostgator will move your sites from your old host to your new one for free. I guess that might be standard with hosts these days, but I’m used to having to do everything myself from the command line. Weirdly enough, they moved all my databases and they still worked!

So we’re about a third of the way transferring 2000 products to Prestashop in the subdirectory. It’s easy enough that employees can help, so I figure another month or so. I like a ton of things about Prestashop. For one, it’s the first database e-commerce system I’ve seen that didn’t look god-awful commercial. Designing your own look is fairly easy because all the designing is CSS and all the complicated stuff comes from modules, most of which are already developed and either free or somewhat inexpensive. Why move such a large static site to database? Because it’s only getting larger, putting off the inevitable, and the third-party shopping cart I am still using until September (Americart) has few of the features my customers want. And their support is iffy. (If they know the answer you’ll get a response.) For $300/year.

Furriners. We like furriners. We like Euros. Prestashop (a European shopping cart solution) easily translates your entire site to a bunch of different languages. I’ve even got a module that tells where a visitor is from and automatically switches the site to that language. Assuming I have it set up. In other words, if you’re from Somalia or Nigeria, I hope you can read ‘murican. Actually, I think I have Prestashop set up to keep bad countries full of con artists and terrorists out. Uh, like go away.

That’s enough for now. I just moved this site to the new VPS just to see if I could do it. Yep, it worked, even the wordpress database. Fun is over, work beckons….

This isn’t as bad as Earworms, but it’s really starting to bug me.

I got an email from Google telling me that someone was trying to retrieve my password and to ignore it if it wasn’t me. I get these all the time.

This time, though, it had the 7 other email accounts “associated with my account”. No, it wasn’t as simple as a period separating the names like everyone in the forums on the web is claiming. If I’m assholeme@gmail.com, I’m not just getting asshole.me@gmail.com and ass.holeme@gmail.com and ass.hole.me@gmail.com’s mail.

That’s at least understandable. No. I’m getting mail meant for asskicker@gmail.com, 002345ass@gmail.com, holeshit123@email.com, etc., totaling seven.

The worst part of it is, I’m not getting any good porn or pics or anything. Just boring personal messages and a ton of crap from verizon, car dealers, etc.

I filter everything that comes in. But more keeps coming.

Unfortunately, I would just kill my account and open one with a ridiculously long name, but my account is actually being used for some critical companies that I need and would be hard to change.

So for right now I’m just burning and saying to myself, “at least is wasn’t an earworm”.

Dead Donkey in the middle of the web?

“Uh…..”
“yeh, yeh, dead donkey dick”
“Shut up Beavis”
“Fartknocker”
“Go stick it in your bunghole..”
“Oh, yeah okay.”
“Uh, I guess we’re back now…uh…”

Seeing the extreme right wing governor of Wisconsin and his Republican cronies trying to crush cops, firemen, teachers and other public workers, I recall Tom Joad’s farewell speech in “The Grapes of Wrath” :

“Maybe it’s like Casey says. A fella ain’t got a soul of his own, but only a piece of a big soul, the one big soul out there that belongs to everybody. And then it don’t matter. Then I’ll be all around in the dark. I’ll be everywhere…Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a company thug beating up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad, and I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready…And when our people eat the stuff they raise, and the houses they build, I’ll be there too.”

(to those historically challenged, “The Grapes of Wrath” was made back during the Thirties, before we had anything like company provided health care, 40 hour work weeks or child labor laws, all of which you can thank the American Union Movement for and none of which would exist if people like Gov. Walker ran the country)