The new site includes an updated portfolio, team bios (including new team member Marshall Sontag), and testimonials from many of our happy clients:

UPDATE: Two people have written to say they’re having technical difficulties on the new site. We tested the site in the most popular web browsers for Mac and Windows, but the bugs aren’t entirely surprising since we’re pushing the envelope some with this design.

In any case, if you encounter problems on the site, I’d be grateful if you left comments below describing them. Please be sure to mention 1. what browser you are using (e.g., FireFox 2.0.0.12), 2. what operating system you are on, and 3. if you know of any ways your browser might be unusual (e.g., if you’ve customized the default font sizes, etc).

Thank you in advance!

UPDATE 2: I think I’ve found the source of the bug for the two people reporting it so far. Try re-setting your browser to show fonts at the normal font size. In Firefox, that would be Font | Text Size | Normal. I’ll look into a more permanent fix for this.

I find myself thinking about designs I’m working on at odd periods of the day—in the shower, making dinner, or walking to the corner store. Small, quiet moments are when I have breakthroughs and solve problems. These are the times when the right details will appear. This isn’t often billable time, but it’s a good exercise to think about a design before attempting it. I don’t sketch much using pencil and paper; I like to let a design percolate and grow in my mind before committing it to the screen. I imagine the look, the feel, and the details. I relish the details.

Amen.

From a technical standpoint, I am a Linux/Apache/PHP/MySQL guy with a preference for cPanel and WHM. However, an increasing number of my client projects these days are larger online applications using Ruby on Rails.

In the past, I’ve worked with FatCow (a B minus, at best, ever since they were bought out by a larger company a couple years ago), HostRocket (a C plus since their phone support can be bogus), and The Planet (an A minus for their managed dedicated server I’ve used for a couple years now).

It’s time to upgrade my server at the Planet, and I’m looking around to see if I can find a company that I’m more excited about. The Planet has been pretty good, all things considered, but sometimes they make me pay for an hour of “advanced support” (at $125 or so an hour) for something that seems to take their support guy three minutes to do.

So now I’m hunting around for other peoples’ reviews of web hosting companies. So far, by far the best web site I’ve found for reading reviews of web hosting companies is Web Hosting Unleashed.

Most “review” sites seem like little more than aggregators of web hosting advertisements. Web Hosting Unleashed has a pleasant design, helpful reviews from real users, and a wide variety of hosting companies on the chopping block. They also offer some good coupons.

My personal favorite so far, based on these WHU reviews, is HostGator. I’m seriously considering moving some of my sites onto their servers.

Check out their blog for more useful background about them as a company. This post particularly impressed me. Imagine, a hosting company with a life — and some serious incentives for their employees to provide first-rate customer service.

For those of us with a need for serious SEO, HostGator has a spin-off company called SEO Hosting that specializes in selling multiple C classes of IP addresses. So all your sites aren’t sitting there on one incestuous IP block, getting devalued by Google for all their cross-links.

I’m skeptical about whether HostGator will work well for Ruby on Rails sites, however, since the conventional wisdom is that you want a VPS server with dedicated resources for the Rails platform.

For that, word on the street is that RailsMachine is awesome and well worth the money, if you can afford the uptick in price.

So I’m using them for both of my new Ruby on Rails projects. I should be able to say much more about them in a couple months.

To facilitate a little more integration between my own blog and that community, I’ve installed the WordPress LiveJournal Crossposter Plugin.

This post is primarily a test to see if things are working properly.

If it is … Hi there, guys.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MuditaJournal

Thank you in advance!

Comments aren’t enabled at the Atlasphere blog, but I do welcome comments here about the new design and functionality, for anyone who cares to share reactions, suggestions, or feedback on the site.

I continue to make small improvements to the site on a daily basis, and I welcome suggestions or further improvement.

Kathy and I often enjoy getting away to a bed & breakfast when we have time for a road trip. So last Christmas, it was fun to have a chance to stay at my mom’s B&B during our family get-together for the holiday.

My brother Ganon and sister Kelsey joined us as well. Below is a photo from our visit.

Kathy, Kelsey, Katie, Joshua and Ganon
at Trimble House B&B in Monterey Virginia

Below are a couple other photos from the visit, that I used when creating her web site. This is the room Kathy and I stayed in:

The Highland Suite (Monterey Virginia B&B)

This is the room my brother Ganon stayed in. This was actually my favorite-looking room at Trimble House:

The Chestnut Suite (Monterey Virginia B&B)

Please visit the Trimble House web site for more information about staying at a Monterey Virginia B&B.

To help remedy the problem, I’ve installed the Did You Pass Math? plugin, which asks a simple math question (e.g., “Please add 4 and 2″) and requires a correct answer before the comment can be submitted.

My initial testing suggests the plugin is working properly and should solve the problem — at least until enough people are using the plugin that some spammer decides to write a script to detect and defeat it. In the interim, it should help keep my inbox less cluttered with spam.

Meantime, if you run into any problems while trying to leave a comment, let me know.

UPDATE: After doing a bit more research, I’ve switched to this similar plugin, which builds upon the “Did You Pass Math?” plugin and seems to work more smoothly.

One reason my why my blogging has been so sparse in recent months is that I’ve been working hard, together with my friend Marshall Sontag, to launch a new business in the wine industry.

Our new company, which we’ve named WineQ, is a “meta” wine club ($4.95/mo) that lets you queue up wines like movies, read plenty of reviews from other consumers while choosing your wines, and receive FREE shipping on orders of $35 or more.

Essentially, we allow people to create their own wine club: Instead of someone else choosing the wines you’re sent, you get to choose. Instead of someone else deciding how often your wines are sent, you get to choose. And instead of paying through the nose for shipping, you get shipping for free.

Shipping wine is costly, often amounting to a 30% markup on the wine you buy over the internet. Other e-tailers generally require you to order a bare minimum of $120 in wine to receive free shipping — so a lot of people are excited about our innovative business model.

See the write-ups we received, for example, at Winecast (WineQ: Wine Club 2.0?) and GoodGrape (The “Netflix Effect” and the World of Wine).

Currently we offer wines from a growing list of small California wineries, all of which are sent direct from the winery to the consumer (although, due to our unique business model, you can combine wines from different wineries into the same order).

Right now our selection is somewhat limited for East Coast customers, since not all of our wineries can ship to those states (e.g., New York). But wine lovers in most western and midwestern states will find plenty to enjoy, and in general our selection of participating wineries will be growing steadily over the coming months.

Our web site is at WineQ.com. Check it out if you’re a wine lover or know friends or family who might be interested!

You can enter the coupon code MUDITA during registration or checkout to receive $10 off your first order, giving your first month’s membership for free.

We also offer unusually good discounts on expedited shipping — $5 for 2-day and $10 for overnight — if you want some exceptional premium wines to round out your holiday dinner plans.

Personally, my favorite wines on our site so far are the Ceja 2003 Vino de Casa Red and Deerfield 2003 RedRex. If you’re more of a white wine person, I can’t say enough about the Ceja 2005 Vino de Casa White. (None of these wines are over $20.)

And you can find many other highly-rated selections on our recommendations page.

Enjoy! And I welcome your thoughts about the site.

It turns out the task is non-trivial when you’re converting to WordPress 2.0 or higher (highly recommended) and you want to preserve the numeric permalinks of your posts.

If you want to keep your old permalinks alive for search engine purposes, and you’ve been using MT’s numeric filenames, then it’s crucial that you preserve the numbering assigned to your old entries.

If you conduct an ordinary import, however, any of the posts you had deleted in MT (e.g., test posts or any posts you decided to take down) will not get counted during WP’s import, causing the numeric IDs of your new posts to not match up with the old ones.

I was able to piece together a solution that worked, however. Below are my instructions.

1. Bone up on the general topic by reading WordPress’s own documentation on importing from MT to WordPress.

2. Edit MT’s export script to include post numbers. I don’t know the first thing about perl, but fortunately Dr. Bacchus provided some crucial guidance on this:

The module that handles MT exports is at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm. In sub export you’ll find a blob of text that starts with $tmpl->text(< <'TEXT'); and defines the template with which stuff will be exported. To that blob, add a new field:

ID: <$MTEntryID$>

Placement doesn’t matter. Save the file and upload it into your old MT installation.

3. Export your entries from MoveableType. Save the exported text file to your hard drive for later use. You might want to peek at the file in a text editor, to confirm that the headers for your posts include the numeric ID for that post.

4. Update WordPress’s script for importing entries. Find the file mt.php inside the folder /wp-admin/import, and rename the file to something like mtORIG.php (for backup purposes).

Then replace the file with this one. In the new version of this file, I’ve altered the function that updates the database, to include the post number when it does the update. (For esoteric reasons, this is not a trivial modification in WordPress v.2. They’re no longer using conventional SQL queries, for one thing.)

NOTE: I am not an experienced WordPress programmer, and I can’t make any guarantees about the fitness of my patch. If anyone with more experience sees problems with my script, please send them along and I’ll update my files accordingly. That said, the script worked like a charm for me — and for another person in the support forums who was having a similar problem.

5. Import your entries into WordPress. Once you’ve uploaded the revised import script into your WordPress installation, you should be able to import just like you normally would, inside the WordPress admin section: Click on the “Import” tab, choose “MoveableType,” and follow the instructions.

BONUS: There’s one other challenge when preserving your numeric permalinks, and that’s padding the zeroes in front of the post ID in the URL. Fortunately Kafkaesqui provides the solution: Edit the template-functions-links.php file (inside the /wp-includes folder). Look for the $rewritereplace array, and in it change:

$post->ID,

to:

zeroise($post->ID, 6),

That uses the WP function zeroise() to force the ID to 6 places by inserting zeros at left when it’s less than 6 digits.

Hope these instructions are helpful. I am available to answer questions on a limited basis. Please post your questions in the comments, below, so that others can benefit from the discussion.