As I mentioned in my last post, I recently migraded my dy/dx tech website to a different hosting company. If you’ve really been paying attention, you may recall that not too long ago I had gotten a Media Temple hosting account with the plans on migrating all of the sites I host, both my own and clients’ to it only to discover that setting up Django on a Media Temple (dv) account is far more trouble than it’s worth. My estimation of that hasn’t changed, in fact I actually cancelled my Media Temple account a few weeks ago after the last client I had hosted there was moved off to another host. My experiences with WebFaction have been so positive (exploding data centers notwithstanding), that I have instead migrated everything to their servers. Well, not everything yet. This blog is still hosted on DreamHost for the time being (though I plan on moving it to a WebFaction hosted WordPress blog in the very near future before eventually migrating it to a Django based solution as I’ve mentioned before).

The hosting hassles referred to in the title, thankfully, have nothing to do with the actual hosting companies I’m dealing with, and are instead due to a foolish mistake on my part: when I switched my domain to WebFaction, I forgot that I had custom MX records enabling the use of my hosted google apps for my domain. As a result, as the new DNS information started propagating, people stopped being able to send me email. Fortunatly, it was an easy fix to just change the MX records with WebFaction, and I don’t think I missed any important emails, but if anyone out there got a bounceback when sending me an email, that’s why.

It’s been a while since I’ve been able to announce a big new project. Not because I haven’t had any, but because everything I’ve been working on lately has been so large that nothing is quite ready to go live yet. But finally, I get to announce a big project that I recently finished: the Becoming MOBOS video blog. As I’m sure many of you from the Boston area are aware, there is a new Mandarin Oriental that’s been under construction down by the Pru. They hired me to create an internal video blog for them. Unfortunately, since it’s internal, I can’t link to it, but the screenshot to the right links to a full-size, albeit redacted, image. It’s a WordPress based blog using a verstion of WPelements.com’s MassiveNews theme customized by your truly. I also used FlowPlayer to provide the Flash video playback capabilities. All in all, I think it turned out to be a pretty slick site.

That’s not the only news, however. In preparation for announcing the Becoming MOBOS site I’ve been doing a little work sprucing up my own website. So I also get to announce a new version of the dy/dx tech website (I also changed hosts for it, so you may need to wait for the DNS to propagate if you’re still seeing the old site). The overall look of the site is the same as before, but I’ve removed some rather pointless elements such as the Google Map that used to be on the front page. In it’s place is now a slideshow of screenshots from my portfolio, which I think is a much better use of the space. The majority of the changes, however, are under the hood. As you may recall, I redeveloped the site using Django a while ago. Since then I’ve spent a lot more time with Django and know a lot more about it, so I completely redeveloped the site (using the newforms-admin branch and was able to make a lot of improvements to the code, and basically leave it better positioned to integrate more features in the future. Among other things, I plan on migrating this blog to a Django-based solution and integrating it into the dy/dx tech website to some extent. I’ve been working heavily with Django for the past several months, and I just keep liking it more and more. It makes every part of my job so much more enjoyable and, in a lot of cases, faster. Be on the lookout for another project going live in the next couple weeks: this one will be Django-based and will be very public, and, I predict, very popular.

Currently I’ve got two projects hosted on WebFaction servers. So far, I really like them. As managed hosts go, they’re probably the best I’ve worked with, and they certainly make life very easy when building Django powered sites.

Today I got an email from one of the clients whose project is hosted on WebFaction saying that their site is down. So I checked it out, and while I was able to access it, it was extremely slow, to the point where a less forgiving browser/LAN setup might cause it to time out. So I fired off a support ticket to WebFaction, and within a couple minutes, not only was the site back up to speed, but I was provided with a very good explanation for why my server was having problems.

Apparently there was an explosion at one of WebFaction’s data centers this weekend. It took out power to the data center, but fortunately no one was hurt and none of the servers were damaged. Obviously, there have been some interruptions in service for the servers in that data center (which includes both of my WebFaction projects), but they’ve already gotten a significant number of the servers back online (though only one of mine).

Amazingly, this is actually the second time I’ve had a server taken out by an explosion at a data center. The first time was with a hosted Microsoft Exchange server with a hosting company in London.

It really sucks having sites down, especially critical ones (fortunately only one of the projects I have hosted with them is critical, and it’s the one that’s back up already), but as reasons for downtime go, you have to admit that an explosion is a pretty good one.

I’m currently working on a fairly large Django project that I think I’ve mentioned a couple times in the past. In that Django project there is a Person model and an Organization model. Both Persons and Organizations have email addresses. Organizations are related to Sites (through a ManyToMany field), but Persons are not (they’re related to Organizations through an intermediary table). I’m currently attempting to create a contact form, so that people can email either a Person or an Organization using newforms.

For security reasons, we don’t want the user to actually see the email address, just the name of the Organization or Person. Fortunately, newforms has the ModelChoiceField class that you pass a queryset of options. In keeping with DRY principles, I want to be able to use a single Form regardless of whether the person is trying to email a Person or an Organization (both models have a field named ‘email_address’). Unfortunately, this is where I ran into my first problem: ModelChoiceField doesn’t really allow you to define the queryset dynamically, you have to define it in the form definition. Luckily I found this blog entry which provides a method to re-define the queryset in the __init__() method which allows you to change it based on the HttpRequest object. My next problem was that I only want the user to be able to email Organizations and Persons on the current Site. Since Organizations are directly related to Sites I just used the CurrentSiteManager. However since People are not directly related to Sites, and are instead related only to Organizations (through an intermediary table), I couldn’t do this. Instead, I decided to try this crazy bit of code:

Person.objects.filter(persontoorganization_map__organization__in=Organization.on_site.all())

Amazingly, it just worked exactly as I would have wanted it to. No fuss, no problems, just a queryset of Persons related to the current site. Go Django!

As you may recall, a while ago I got myself an account at MediaTemple with the idea that I’d move all my websites over to there. I had previously been using Dreamhost, but wanted something a little more high quality so that I could reasonably offer hosting services to some of my clients. MediaTemple seemed like a good way to go, and for the most part their service has been great.

Unfortunately, I have run into a few problems. Most importantly, despite spending a fairly significant number of man-hours working on it, I’ve been unable to get Django running on my (dv) server. Yes, they have a (beta) program that makes it easy to run Django on a (gs) account, but for my needs a (gs) simply won’t do and I really don’t want to have multiple accounts with them. The end result of this is that several of my web pages are still running on Dreamhost because they require Django (this blog actually is as well even though it’s currently a WordPress blog, because I want to switch to something Django-based and it seems like an unreasonable hassle to migrate my WordPress blog to a new server only to then have to migrate it again to new software, especially as I’m currently holding onto my Dreamhost account for my Django-based pages anyway).

The issue is now coming to a bit of a breaking point. Why? Because I’m currently working on a pretty large Django-based website that will be going live in the next month or two. For the purposes of development, it’s being hosted on WebFaction, which has been an amazing host. They make it incredibly simple to host a Django site, to the point that basically zero setup is required. But as we get closer to the point of going live, I’ve been considering what the hosting needs of the site will be going further, and how to best serve them.

The site is a redevelopment of an existing site, so we can get a pretty good idea of what the traffic numbers are going to look like. This will let us extrapolate the RAM and bandwidth requirements pretty well too. The issue, is that once the Django version of the site goes live, we’re going to start to expand it. Thanks to the capabilities of Django, it’s being developed with the potential for massive growth in mind. Specifically, it’s using Django’s Sites framework to allow for expansion to several sites. Currently there are only two, but the Django version will go live with 4 or 5, and there’s the potential to expand far beyond that.

This means that we’re going to require a pretty large number of (software) servers. There’s the MySQL server running the back-end, an HTTP server for static content, and then an HTTP server for each site, and they’re all going to be using up resources to different extents. Trying to find the best hosting solution for this sort of setup has led me to a couple of options:

1. Stay with WebFaction. A number of people have said they believe that WebFaction’s shared hosting plans should be able to accomodate this. WebFaction provides a very good combination of ease of use and low-level access, their prices are good, and the way they have their hosting set up, it’s extremely simple to add another Django install complete with its own Apache/mod_python instance. They also offer dedicated server, but I think there are probably better routes to go than with WebFaction’s dedicated servers.
2. Switch to Slicehost. I’ve only just learned about Slicehost, but so far they look like a pretty sweet deal. For a very reasonable price you get a virtualized server running a Linux distro of your choice (you can choose from 8 right now) run on Xen. They claim not to oversell their servers, so you’re guaranteed to actually get the full capacity that you pay for (unlike with budget hosts such as Dreamhost). And since you’re getting your own virtualized host you have full root access. They basically have nothing preinstalled, so you can easily set it up in whatever configuration you want without having to deal with the vagaries of the anointed hosting package (Plesk on MediaTemple, I’m looking at you). I really like like look of them, and they’ve been getting good reviews. They’re currently listed as the number 2 hosting company on Djangofriendly, behind only WebFaction. With my background in IT and Linux administration, the fact that I’d have to manage everything myself isn’t enough to scare me away either. The fact that they let you choose your Linux distro really appeals to me as well, as I’m by far more familiar and comfortable with Gentoo than any other Linux distro. I only wish they offered FreeBSD slices, but the only reason they don’t is technical, and once that issue is resolved it sounds like they plan on it. In a lot of ways, they’re basically a very affordable colocation provider. The biggest issue, it sounds like, is that apparently communication between different slices counts against your bandwidth allotment (for both slices, presumably). This means that as the site I’m working on grows, if it spreads out to multiple slices (which it undoubtedly would and which I’d want it to do since that will give the added reliability of spreading across multiple physical machines) we’ll basically be billed for database access from the sites that aren’t on the slice with the database server.
3. Colocation. Colocation is basically the 800 lbs. gorilla in the room. It costs a lot more, but you get what you pay for. With colocation we’d have all the advantages of Slicehost (minus the low price, of course) plus the ability to expand more or less arbitrarily. We could have as many physical machines as we wanted running as much or as little of the site as we wanted. Provided we’re willing to pay, of course. On top of that all the server management would again fall to me, but this time without some of the nice shortcuts that Slicehost offers. Essentially, colocation is alway the fall-back option. But hopefully one of the other two hosts can offer us a solution that’s a little more balanced: we get less control, but more simplicity and ease of use for a greatly reduced price.

At the moment, I’m leaning towards sticking with WebFaction for now. I’m already very impressed with what they offer, and from the sound of things, they’ll continue to be a more than adequate host as we expand. But I’m also definitely looking for input. If anyone has any suggestions or recommendations I’d love to hear them. In particular, any first-hand experience with hosting large Django sites with any of these solutions are most welcome.

It’s been far too long since I’ve written anything. A whole lot has happened since the last post, much of it work. I’m on track for my biggest project yet to go live pretty soon, and I’ve got a number of other smaller projects that should be released even before then.

In the mean time Jessi and I spent 10 days on the west coast at the end of last month. It was a fairly busy travel schedule: fly from Boston to San Francisco on Friday so Jessi could host an OurStage.com sponsored Yelp party, then Saturday morning fly from San Francisco to San Diego where we spent a relaxing weekend with some very fun members of Jessi’s family I hadn’t met before, the Monday Jessi took the train to LA for some meetings and I flew straight back to San Francisco (LA’s just not my town) to hang out with friends and see my dad until Jessi came back up on Wednesday for NoisePop (also sponsored by OurStage), then back to Boston on the following Monday. It was definitely very nice to be back in the Bay Area, although I learned that it’s never a good idea to plan on relying on the free WiFi in a hotel. Though our hotel (the Civic Center Holiday Inn) had it, it was pretty flaky and seemed to have some policy in place that prevented outgoing traffic, which meant I couldn’t SSH into my server, which meant I was severely limited in what I was able to do from the hotel. Fortunately we were right across the street from the absolutely amazing San Francisco Public Library main branch which is probably my second favorite public library after Boston’s Copley Square branch, and provides pretty fast free WiFi. All in all it was a very good, but very exhausting trip.

Since getting back, my focus has been pretty much all business. I’ve gotten a lot of work done, though I still have a lot of work left to do, and hopefully I should be able to make some pretty big business-related announcements over the next couple months. I did, actually, have one small business milestone while in San Francisco: I hired my first contractor for a small job. Jesse Legg helped me out with a quick project so that I would have the free time to work on another that had a looming deadline. Not really that big of a deal, but I think it’s still an indication that I’m on the right track and my business is continuing to grow.

In other news, I just saw on Gizmodo a story about a new eBook reader from Netronix. It’s basically like they took Amazon’s Kindle and made the changes that I would have wanted made: they added a touchscreen interface and gave it WiFi instead of EV-DO. While the lack of EV-DO obviously limits it in terms of being able to get content no matter where you are, I think it will prove to be a more useful direction for eBook readers. What I would like to see, similar to Amazon’s always-on eBook store, is some framework by which people with a WiFi enabled eBook reader can walk into a brick and mortar bookstore, browse through the books, and, when they find what they want, but it electronically and download it directly to their reader via the store’s WiFi network. In some ways this would be less convenient than Amazon’s store, but it would also be vastly more flexible and give people the option of still supporting their local bookstores. I would also really like to see this sort of technology extended to libraries, although the whole premise of the library is predicated on the limited time that you have access to the materials, so it would probably require some sort of DRM in order to be workable. Hopefully, with the popularity of the Kindle, eInk technology and the whole concepts of eBooks will start to advance more quickly and we’ll start seeing better and better reader technology. I know I will definitely own an eBook reader of some sort in the next few years. I just hope it has some mechanism for both the sort of WiFi store described above and some note taking capacity.

2007 being over, and taxes looming on the horizon, I figured I should probably put together my finances for the year. I should have been keeping track of this on an ongoing basis, but…

Pretty much as soon as I started to delve into my records, I realized something: my hard copy records were fairly abysmal. Fortunately, I keep everything on my computer, and the hard copies are more of a convenience thing; as it is apparently the case that they’re not actually all that convenient, I’m going to transition into fully electronic record keeping. Don’t worry, I keep everything backed up both locally and remotely. I am in IT after all.

I realized something else almost immediately: things are actually going pretty well, especially when you also take my 2006 numbers into account. My business having started in the summer of 2006, I had pretty low revenues for that year. In fact, both my Q1 and Q4 revenues for 2007 were greater than my total revenues for 2006. The upshot of that is that in 2007 I saw approximately 300% growth in revenue over 2006. Quarter by quarter, I maintained an average growth of slightly over 55%.

One point of interest: on November 1 I changed my business model. In that month I brought on a new partner, and December ended up being my second highest grossing month yet, despite the holiday slowdown. Obviously I don’t have the final numbers yet, but I can pretty much guarantee that January will beat it, and February will likely beat January. In fact, I’m currently set for Q1 of 2008 to not only be my highest grossing quarter so far, but to repeat the performance of Q1 2007 and gross higher than the entire previous year.

I think this means that my business model is working.

So, a little while ago I got a MediaTemple (dv) server. In general, they seem to be pretty good. The server’s been fast and reliable so far, I get a good amount of storage and bandwidth for the price, and I have root access so theoretically I can do pretty much whatever I want. I have run into a bit of a problem however.

For the past several days I’ve been banging my head against installing Django on my MediaTemple server. In theory this should be pretty easy. The server comes with Apache and mod_python installed, so all that I should need to do is check out the lated django trunk from svn, make a few symlinks, install MySQLdb, change some Apache configurations to tell it to use Django for the appropriate URLs, and go. In practice, it’s not working quite so well.

The first few steps were simplicity itself. It wasn’t long before I had a successful Django install and was able to ‘python manage.py syncdb’ to have my projects database tables created. Changing the Apache settings was a little more difficult because you can’t actually modify the httpd.conf as Plesk will overwrite it. Of course, there’s no documentation telling you this or telling you the appropriate solution (despite, I might add, the insistence of the MediaTemple KnowledgeBase that instructions for installing Django on a (dv) server exist somewhere). A little help from Django’s Google Groups community helped me out with that, though, letting me know that I instead need to create a /var/www/vhosts/MYDOMAIN.COM/conf/vhosts.conf file and put the settings in there. So I did that, and it even seems to work, but when I try to actually go to the page I get this:

Mod_python error: "PythonHandler django.core.handlers.modpython"

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/mod_python/apache.py", line 299, in HandlerDispatch
    result = object(req)

  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/django/core/handlers/modpython.py", line 188, in handler
    return ModPythonHandler()(req)

  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/django/core/handlers/modpython.py", line 161, in __call__
    response = self.get_response(request)

  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/django/core/handlers/base.py", line 64, in get_response
    response = middleware_method(request)

  File "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/django/contrib/sessions/middleware.py", line 15, in process_request
    request.session = engine.SessionStore(session_key)

AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'SessionStore'

Apparently, for some reason, there’s some problem with Django’s sessions middleware, although no one else seems to have discovered this problem. If I remove sessions (and therefore the admin app) from my project the page will actually load, but it then fails to actually be able to get anything from the database so gives me errors on any page that requires database calls (most of them). Thus far neither the Google Groups nor the expert aid of Jesse Legg have been able to help me make any progress in solving this issue.

There are people out there running Django on MediaTemple (dv) servers, so I know this is possible, and I’m confident that I’ll get it eventually. But in the mean time it’s incredibly frustrating and is putting serious delays in the process of transitioning my sites over to MediaTemple (not to mention in the development of some other Django projects I’m working on right now). You can be sure that when I finally get Django working on my (dv) server that I’ll be writing a detailed account of exactly how it was done. There really needs to be some documentation on this out there.

The other day I got a call from a recruiter. Apparently Apple wants to hire me to work at the Genius Bar at the new Boyleston Apple Store. Presumably they found me through my Apple certification, and I certainly have the resume for the job. Being a Genius isn’t really that bad a gig. You get something like $20/hour, benefits, and, of course, you get to play with toys all day. Of course this isn’t exactly the direction I’m looking to go in professionally. I have no particular desire to work retail. And I certainly have no particular desire to do nothing but fix people’s computers for $20 and hour when I already do that for more money on the side of a more lucrative business. I might consider a job managing the Genius Bar, but retail tech support seems like a bit of a backwards step at this point.

On top of that I think I may be on the cusp of moving my business to the next stage. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve transitioned my business into being primarily about web development and services. My business model has been to partner with web developers who need someone to do the programming for them. This strategy has been working very well, and for the past few months I’ve been much busier on average than I had been previously. Now, I think, things may be about to really take off.

I’m about to start a very big project, my biggest so far. Because of that, I’m basically going to be completely booked for the next two to three months while I work on this. But, with my business model being as successful as it has been lately, I can be pretty sure that during this time there will be a number of other opportunities that arise (in fact I already know of a few that will be coming up soon). This is exactly the position I’ve been working towards since I started this whole experiment just about 18 months ago: having more work coming in than I can handle myself. This means I’m finally at the point where I can seriously consider hiring more people. Of course at this point I’m really only looking for a contractor or two. Someone who can put in a few hours a month for me doing the work I don’t have time for myself.

Having gotten to that point there’s a clear path forward. While I work on this big new project, I’d only hire contractors as I need them for the work I don’t have time for myself. Once it’s done and I have a little more leeway to think about other things I can continue to take advantage of them to reduce my own work load and let me spend more time on finding new business. At some point after that I should be able to have enough business coming in that I can afford to hire a developer full-time and focus primarily on sales myself. And, of course, if that goes well I can hire someone to do sales full-time, and then I’ll really be getting somewhere. The obvious ‘end-point’ of this strategy is for me to be managing a company that employs a full-time sales staff as well as a full-time development staff. Maybe even bringing in my own design team, although I think I’d prefer to maintain my partnerships with a large network of designers. At any rate, I think I’m finally approaching the point where I can truly consider this whole venture to be ’successful’.

In the meantime, I guess I should start looking for some contractors. Any LAMP developers out there who might be interested in a little freelance work? I’m mostly looking for PHP developers, but those working with Python, ASP, Ruby and others are welcome as well. Also, I’d favor the Boston area at this point, but am definitely interested in expanding geographically as well. Feel free to send me resumés at josh@dydxtech.com.

I’ve been meaning to do it for a while, but I’ve finally gotten around to creating a portfolio. Since my website is now Django based this was incredibly easy, and probably only took about 45 minutes to do. Previously I’ve just been keeping a list of links to former projects that I included in emails to prospective clients. I didn’t really want to put up a portfolio when I only had a handful of projects to show off. But in the past few days three different projects went live: Lola Boston for which I created the locations database, Tundratour for which I created a database for the different trips as well as a ’shopping cart’ to allow people to request more information on multiple trips at once, and Sel De La Terre which was live before but now has a tool for purchasing gift cards online that I created. I figured that 5 projects was a big enough number to go live with, especially as it should be growing pretty rapidly in the next few months.

I’m still trying to decide if I want to put more information in there. Should I put in a little description of each project, or at least expand on what my contribution to the project was? The Chainsaw Awards page was nominated for the MITX awards, I should probably mention that somewhere. Fortunately, now that it’s there it will be easy enough to add more to it. The other question I’ve been asking myself is whether or not I should include websites that I worked on at my old job. I was just as much responsible for those projects as the ones I’m doing now, but somehow it just seems like I should leave them off. Fortunately again, it will be easy to add those later if I decide to. And in the meantime I have a portfolio to show off. A pretty nice one, if I do say so myself.

Also, I do still intend to write that post that I promised while I was in Jamaica, I’ve just been very busy ever since getting back. I’m going to be away again this weekend (Florida for another wedding), so hopefully I’ll be able to get to it next week when I’m back.