Category: Hosting

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes The China Sports Blog:

A year ago, Shantou University in eastern Guangdong province hired [J-School graduate Nicole Nazzaro] to design an academic program in sports journalism, with the hope that some students from this program would be able to attain a high enough level of expertise in both sports journalism and English-language reporting skills that they would be qualified to work at the 2008 Summer Olympic Games in Beijing.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes itags.net, a wiki describing the draft specification for “i-tags”

The basic idea of an i-tag (identity tag, independent tag, intelligent tag – take your pick) is that a user could tag an object on their own site (photo, video, sound file, text or an entire blog post), where the tag, and the object, would then go out through the RSS feed or be spidered, with some additional information that doesn’t now exist in tags.

More at the site. itags.net is run by Mary Hodder, who also runs the Napsterization blog on Birdhouse.

Never build when you can buy snarg for free. Had been contemplating writing a tool to aggregate server load averages over time, so I could really nail our peak resource usage times. Today found and installed Doug Robbins’ loadavg – a PHP-based tool that does exactly that, and shows additional vital stats to boot. Dynamic displays looking back through time, clear visuals, exactly what I was looking for. Nice companion to the excellent vpsinfo.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes Edges of Bounty, a site representing an upcoming book collaboration between photographer Scott Squire and writer William Emery, covering California’s Central Valley.

Our project consists of a series of extended roadtrips around the valley, our notebooks and cameras in tow, talking to people, listening to their stories, and photographing their way of life and the products of their labor.

Squire also runs the excellent nonfictionphoto and nonfictionweddings sites, also on Birdhouse.

Got the strangest call today. The number that appeared on my phone’s display was bizarre: 001-416. The voice on the other end launched directly into a polite, quasi-legalistic rant about how “my intellectual property was in danger” regarding one of the domains I manage (for a customer). I kept pressing him for details, but all I got was piles of scripted fluff. But pretty good fluff. Things like “We need to verify your address for the domain notification processor.” But all attempts to get them to explain what a “notification processor” were met with another line of nonsense.

It was pretty clear to me that this was the phone equivalent of those increasingly popular quasi-legalistic letters sent to domain owners attempting to buffalo users into either changing registrars or into registering every possible associated TLD on the base name. The latter is the key to understanding the jive about how your intellectual property may be in danger — the pitch is that if someone else registers yourname.us, you may never have complete control over yourname!

The guy (who was calling from India, BTW) didn’t succeed in getting any information or confirmation out of me, but I was impressed by the fact that he seemed to have a plausible-sounding nonsense answer to every question I threw at him. And though my questions about what company he worked for were answered with things like “We represent all domain registrars,” he was happy to send me to Domain Registry Support — a site which boldly attempts to lend itself phony cred by linking to the IETF and the W3C. Sycophants.

Quick search on their name pulled up dozens of pages like this one, filled with comments from people who had just gotten off the phone with DRS.

Shields up; predators everywhere.

Birdhouse Hosting welcomes reelblue.net, a starter site promoting the coming documentary film “Reelblue” by J-School graduates Sachi Cunningham and Jennifer Galvin. The film investigates the relationship between healthy oceans and healthy humans, as seen through the eyes of surfers.

Conceptualized initially as an alternate support avenue for Birdhouse users, but also serving as a multi-function water cooler, we’ve launched our own IRC channel! Accessible via the Live Chat option on the hosting pages, or through any standard IRC client. Come idle a while in #birdhouse on GIMPnet. No guarantees at any given time that anyone will be around, but we’ll see what grows.

Many thanks to IRC superfreak and Birdhouse backup sysadmin mneptok for all the IRC plumbing and text — I just plugged it in.