ShawnReed.Com

One of the potential factors to a website’s relevance is the number of images that display on your site, that are actually hosted elsewhere.

This doesn’t happen often on normal sites, but can be factor on blogs or forums where users insert external links to images hosted on other sites. A common example would be pictures uploaded on Photobucket and then posted on other sites.

On my Xenforo forum, I’m working with DigitalPoint’s image proxy addon successfully but at the same time Xenforo’s developers are making a similar feature one of the built-in benefits of the upcoming version 1.3.

What this does is makes externally-hosted images something that is a part of your site. Even if it’s just for a few hours, your users will be presented with an encrypted (if you configure it), cached, and potentially optimized version of an external image – rather than having to wait for it re-download.

Another benefit is the reduction (elimination) of cookie-stuffing that results from visiting my site. Using the same example above, I rarely visit Photobucket but had been receiving cookies from that site often until now.

It is great to see so many positive changes.

One could say that I’m out of the trial period for Ghost, due to having written more personal blog posts than on previous platforms.

So I moved my blog out of the AWS EC2 infrastructure and relocated to a data center in San Francisco. I must have created/terminated at least six instances on EC2 to get to a working implementation of Ghost that I liked.

My first stint with Nginx has been positive so far, but limited to just forcing the “www” in my domain. I’m eager to learn more.

Check out the Ghost documentation about using debug mode and exporting your content. Remember to grab your theme and images also. Other than that it is easy.

At the time of this writing the site is still using a free theme, but I made some changes:

• Re-enabled HTML optimizations
• Changed over to minified versions of the CSS and Javascript files
• Worked on the Javascript animation a bit, to address issues with older mobile devices. I’m still not happy, but the experience is greatly improved
• A few back-end changes to improve server RAM utilization
• Changed the network config to what I use on my other production systems

Should you use Ghost? If your needs can be met with a simple non-traditional layout then give it a try. Stick with your current CMS if you still needs include categories or other structured information.

If you haven’t signed up for Amazon’s EC2 service, they may give you a free year of micro-instance service. See how I got my start with Ghost for more info.

Nothing quite like setting up your child’s first computer.

I opted for Windows 8.1 primarily because of how my child responds to it. Microsoft knows what it is doing by leaving us old folks behind.

We were tag-teaming the addons and software programs, and our inexperience with free mods for games and learning software exposed us to the world of bundled malware/spyware.

Being accustomed to commercial programs and non-windows systems has shielded us from the brutal assault on the average computer user; it is nothing like what it was a few years ago. I’ve been controlling my websites, but lost touch with the end-result until today.

Today I learned that both free and commercial programs designed for adware/malware removal are challenged with keeping up with the creative ways developers are hiding their software. In the end I engaged a Security Professional from Symantec and gave the team remote access to our computer. They initially took the same steps as myself, but I could tell that they enlisted an upper-level engineer that cleaned out the multiple programs and registry entries that made up one piece of spyware.

Regardless, my child’s computer is clean. Makes me want to go back to the ancient times when I participated in Computer User Group meetings and shared software.