• My Daytona 900 isn’t running well
• The Daytona675 won’t be available until Spring 2006
• Triumph isn’t going to be at the Cycle World IMS

With Bikes, Blues, & BBQ just days away I’m starting to wonder if I should start paying more attention to what friends are saying about my unwavering dedication toward Triumph. It might be time to consider being a multi-brand owner so that I can spend more time riding.

I think it is time to consider the larger Motorcycle Portal …

Let’s suppose that one day George W. singed into law a daily requirement that everyone in the US must eat one scoop of Ice Cream. To keep it simple, lets say that only a few major chains were allowed to participate in this effort. In order to make sure that the entire population was accessible, the law didn’t restrict how you got it. One could go to a restraurant, pick up some at the local grocery store, or have it brought to them if they weren’t able to obtain it without assistance.

For many, aside from some weight gain and increased heart disease, this would be a good thing – a reason to celebrate.

However, for those who are very health-focused – or can’t consume dairy products – the new law would be no different than slavery.

The same goes for those who would push their beliefs onto the masses on TriumphRat.Net. The site is designed to push the enthusiasm that naturally surrounds Triumph Motorcycles, and not much else. Meaning that for many subjects outside Triumph Motorcycles, a user is feeling the pinch of being controlled by another. One would assume that folks would naturally avoid such situations.

Instead, I’m hounded by people in amazing and creative ways that they want to be slaves. Using just about every negative descriptive a shallow mind can think of, we witness a group feed on each other’s weaknesses. Creating more posts about myself than has ever been done since my BBS days in the 80′s.

One would think that a Triumph Motorcycle was enough.

In 2006, Triumph will replace the 650 Four-Cylinder with a triple in the 700-800cc range.

I’m still undecided if now is the best time to purchase such a bike, or cross over to the Sport Touring side and finally get a SprintST. Today, someone told me about a low-mileage Triumph SuperIII that was within four hours driving distance at a dealer north of me.

Maybe I’m not ready for fuel-injected …

It started a few days ago with an email from my Spam Service Provider, an automated message stating that it couldn’t find the proper MX records on my personal domain name (ShawnReed.Com).

Yesterday, after a glourious ride through Missourri and NW Arkansas (also saw the new BMW K1200S), I had several emails from TriumphRat.Net users on the US East Coast and the UK stating that they have been having problems accessing TriumphRat.Net.

Major ISPs were affected; Verizon, Comcast, and BT Internet.

This morning I received an email from my current DNS Service Provider (WorldNiC / Network Solutions):

Dear Shawn Reed,

Thank you for contacting Network Solutions.

We are currently experiencing a degradation of service on some of our servers. Our engineering team is aware of the issue and it is our top priority to resolve. We apologize for any inconvenience you may be experiencing.

Thank you for submitting your request to Network Solutions.

Sincerely,

Network Solutions Specialist
Network Solutions, LLC

While I have always believed the next large-scale Internet catastrophe will be a significant attack on DNS. What better way for one of Allah’s warriors to prove his worth by plunging the world back 20 years through a systematic murder of the world’s primary DNS NAPs.

Think of all the business done on the Internet today. If we were to set aside consumer eCommerce as un-important, there is still enough DNS-dependent traffic to cause a significant economic downturn in a matter of days (or hours).

Does your business or company use SSL-enabled web applications over the Internet, or maybe an SSL VPN? Or worse, your network admin has tied the resolution of your IP-Sec VPN to a DNS record.

The creator of DNS was recently quoted in NETWORK WORLD as stating that an attack on DNS would be futile, due to the multi-redudant systems making up the world’s DNS network. My dis-agreement with that assessment, up to now, has been due to the risk associated with running your own DNS server. Setting one up isn’t technically challenging, but keeping it from being hacked is. For me, one experience was enough to encourage others to always outsource DNS to a provider with a team and process in place to manage it.

Seems that recent events are proving that my forecast was right.

We need laws in place with specific punishments for DNS attacks:

• Life sentences for US Citizens that hack (or attempt to hack) public DNS servers
• Pre-Approved processes for US Intelligence Agencies to “recover” terrorists that do the same
• Congressional backing to attack & invade countries that can’t control it

The WTC was a sad event, but killing DNS has far greater consequences. It’s time to wise up and make some changes!

A recent post by one of my friends on TriumphRat.Net, about the recent sales and stock drop at Harley Davidson, is making “virtual vultures” out of us. Who can blame us?

The economy is improving, but not without continued shifts in our corporate economy. This represents a significant portion of the revenue that has supported H-D over the last decade. Unless you are in a profession that thrives in change, such as a corporate attorney, purchasing a new VRod or Electra Glide isn’t a priority on your agenda.

Some people think this is the beginning of the end for H-D, it’s too early to tell. As long as girls continue to prefer DynaGlides over Thruxtons, it’s anyone’s guess.

CentOS is basically the efforts a small development team that obtains the source code/files for Red Hat Enterprise and compiles them into their own distro. The idea in itself is sound, if you like using Red Hat.

From a server perspective, Red Hat is a very stable distribution, but I haven’t been that excited about using it for a desktop OS. For example, I keep a P3-based machine in my office just to use as a file storage server (within my LAN) currently running SuSE. If I wiped it clean and did a pure text-based CentOS install (I don’t use X on my file server), then it would be very similar to Red Hat and would likely run very well.

However, if I wanted to do anything more than just a simple Linux-based application like storing files, then it doesn’t take long for one of many other distros to catch up and surpass CentOS. Things like Windows networking, multimedia, and support are either commercially available or freely available through enthusiastic users.

So if I looked at it another way, it wouldn’t be that difficult to use Debian or Gentoo for the same file server. Hell, let’s just throw Fedora on it

You get the picture – just my opinion.

The low-cost webhosting business is nothing more than a bunch of marketing B.S.

Get this; 2400 Gig of Disk Space – 150 Gig of Data Transfer – and many other BS Features = $7.00 per month.

It goes on and on, and people actually waste their time mulling over all of these services as if it is as significant as reading automotive reviews in Consumer Reports.

Look at disk space: Some hosting services offer 2 Gig of disk space, which does make some sense but where does 2400 Gig come from? Even if they did provide it, you would have to fly in and install a high speed storage server to make regular backups a bearable experience.

Somebody stop the bandwidth BS: 150 Gigs! Geez man, if your website had enough content for kind of draw it would have to fall within such a fine spec that maybe 1% of the worlds websites could fall into. For the rest of us, if you are transferring that much data your site is doing more to the server than just transferring bandwidth.

The fact is that the small hosting market has become so consumed in low-cost hosting that it is almost impossible to find a provider who does the “necessities”. Things like a guaranteed share of the server’s processor or memory would be a start. Firewall support would also be nice, but most webmasters don’t understand the significance of locking down your site (come to think of it, most web hosting providers don’t know either).

Personal Blogs are usually not entirely server resource intensive, so what should you use? Well, if security and availability aren’t a concern then just about any service will work. However, if security and availability are a concern and you don’t mind a little commercial advertisement on your site then check out what the big ISPs or Portals offer (AOL, Yahoo, Google, etc.) They may not be perfect, but at least there are some smart folks behind the infrastructure.

If you prefer to go it on your own, then get ready because few Hosting Providers have a working knowledge of Network Security of Server Administration. Don’t believe the BS that most spew out about 24×7 NOCs and around-the-clock engineers, because the web hosting reseller business is huge. All they have to do is setup a snazzy website and wait for the unsuspecting to sign up.

My advice is either sign up with a big-name hosting company, or find a small business in your area that provides hosting. You’ve either got a well-established support process to fall back on or a local relationship that may not always be available, but you’ll better understand what your challenges may be. For example, if your site does do 150Gigs of data transfer the next web hosting choice will represent a smarter decision.

Some would say I should have jumped, but instead the SuSE install DVD went back into the drive and did a clean install after a failed KDE upgrade trashed my system and caused a series of Kernel panics. It wasn’t an exactly time-intensive process, but did take most of the weekend to get back to normal.

It is also nice to have a clean Linux install again, free of the remnants of previous tests and setup with a bit less bloat.

Besides, SuSE now appears to be on the revenue-generating path. In a few days SuSE 9.3 will be orderable, just months after 9.2 was released.

Don’t confuse my definition of Ranking with how high you place on search engines. Instead, it is what another rank another site assigns you.

For some sites, it is nearly impossible to win hearts and minds by traffic alone. There are plenty of informative places to go, that may never attain a traffic level higher than a few hundred page views per month. One example would be a site with pictures of German Sheperd pups for sale (I’m still looking for something to replace Murphy).

If we measured by traffic alone, then my site TriumphRat.Net, should command mega-dollar advertising rates. At least enough to buy me a few more bikes

Some folks think that Google’s PageRank feature is a sure-fire way to attain preferred status. In fact, some consultants make handsome sums feeding their clients that garbage.

Then others do the various tricks that involve creative keywords, hidden texts, and jump pages. Yet, with all of the stupid implementations, most of it actually does work when words aren’t abused.

We could go on exploring, but the truth for most sites is that creative effort is needed to be found by your target audience.

Here are some proven strategies:

• Don’t use execessive images – If you don’t know CSS or have a creative design in mind, hire a developer to do it for you.
• Don’t use excessive Flash or Shockwave – Don’t sign off on a project where the site is nothing but a bunch of multimedia unless you’re already spending millions in marketing somewhere else. For example, Ozzy Osbourne can have a 100% Flash Site, Sharon has already done a wonderful job marketing him and doesn’t need help from Yahoo or Google.
• Spend more time on your content – Make sure site informative and resourceful, so many fail to do this.
• Spend less time on your Meta Tags – If your using a language like PHP, ASP, HTML/OS, JSP, & etc. try assigning dynamic variables to your tags that represent the content on the page. I’ve done it before – it works.
• Crosslinking – Allow sites to link to you that need your site as a resource, but not the other way around. If you link to another site with the same content as yours, why would anyone go to your site (or why would search engines).

Simply put, the old idea of constantly changing content only works if it benefits both the user and the indexers & search engines that are looking for the information you have to offer.