Alcides Fonseca

Everyday we approach more and more the Semantic web, and one of the major steps we are giving is adopting standards. One of them is oEmbed that allows you to get some information about a online resource like Flickr, youtube, etc..

But looks like the Youtube guys haven’t managed to get some 20% time to implement it, so I did it myself based on Vikram Vaswani’s code. You can reach the endpoint at http://junk.ideias3.com/oembed/youtube.php. The syntax is explained in the oEmbed webpage, and you even got some extra attributes ;)

Dreamhost is one of the most well-known hosting companies around the world. And it happens to be the one where this website is hosted (along with all ideias3 websites).

When I subscribed for the hosting the plan was a bit different than now. I pay about $120 a year and the storage started at 200GB and is increasing 1GB per week. Looks like now for the same price you get 500GB (with weekly increases of 2GB). Pretty neat, hein?

Well, it couldn’t be that good. I must admit the price is really good, but getting an account at Dreamhost is like playing the roulette. Your account can be created in one of their multiple servers. There are a lot of bad reviews and a lot of good ones. Since it’s shared hosted, it all depends on your server neighborhood.

I have had a great experience in Dreamhost. I never worried about the storage limit as I did in other hosts I’ve been client in the past. And there are a few goodies that make me love them:

• Great Panel Control
• Unlimited Databases, Domains, Email accounts, unlimited EVERYTHING! (but for space and bandwidth)
• SVN server with a really simple of setting up repos!
• Jabber server (so I can have a jabber me@alcidesfonseca.com)
• One-Click install for most popular opensource applications (Wordpress…)
• Supports Ruby on Rails (We have a few RoR projects running) and now they supports mod_rails!
• Doesn’t support Django… But simple websites run pretty fine \o/ (like this one!)
• Best interface for managing domain registrations I’ve seen so far!

To sum up: they’re the perfect hosting if you want to host some PHP or small RoR/Django websites, your email, your svn repos and do some backups! If you want to have a high up-time and cpu/memory consuming website, you should go for a VPS (like I did with Slicehost).

The background

Over my internet years (more than 8 now) I’ve always kept a online presence. It started as a personal webpage, and then evolved into a blog that had several incarnations. The last one Maelstrom of Ideas, Code and Politics was probably the most successful one, and the platform was not enough for that.

Being a programmer myself, I’ve never considered my personal page as a “production” website, but rather as a development sandbox where I would try the stuff I was learning. That’s the reason why the contents of the old blog weren’t imported to this wiki, and it will still be available at a different address (http://blog.alcidesfonseca.com) but inactive. (For geeks: I had a lot of issues with encodings and I converted textile to html before adding to the database, and I take a different approach in this wiki).

So, why a wiki?

I wasn’t completely happy with the blog format. Mainly because I wanted to post code snippets, and I wouldn’t be happy if they were considered blog posts. So I considered a personal wiki. But this is not really a wiki. First there is only one author, me, but that might change in the future. Second, I don’t keep track of all the versions of a page (But I backup the database into a SVN repository). And third, some of the pages are blog posts, but inside a wiki. This might be confusing at first, but some people call it bliki.

Cool, you invented some cool new concept!

Not really, blikis are not a new thing. They haven’t reached the mainstream yet. This idea was heavily based on Rui Carmo’s The Tao of Mac. That’s a bliki I really admire. Not only for the platform, but also for the content. I could use his bliki platform Yaki, but this website is running on a shared host and I like Django pretty much. Plus, I got to play with it the way I want!

So I guess you’ll stop blogging and start writing wiki pages…

Kind of… I’ll still write blog entries, but I’ll probably write some of them (like software reviews) as a wiki page. But you’ll get the most important ones in the RSS feed, so you won’t get little insignificant pages, and the ones that I put my efforts into will reach your RSS reader for sure!

I just hope I don’t regret this :)