New Online Shopping Cart has been setup!
I have been working hard at getting a real online store front end setup on this site. To a point it is for testing and self education, if someone needs a site with a good online shopping cart and doesn’t want to pay a pretty penny, I have figured out just the solution that will work.
With that being said, the online store has about a dozen parts in it right now. I decided to pull down the seemingly dated “services” page and replace it with the online store. You will now be able to find the same services inside the store, each with their own individual descriptions of various tasks. (Although at the time of writing this there is only half of one service in there, more are coming!) Expect to see this wrapping up on Thursday or Friday, as I have some computer wheeling and dealing that I need to focus on for the early part of this week and next.
Other updates, and Windows NT?
In other news the web server split is complete and works well. I was forced to implement a DNS server at the same time which was fairly painless thanks to the most incredibly outdated version of windows known to the modern internet. (Windows NT) I chose this route because configuring DNS in Solaris / Linux is very cumbersome for me at this point in time. I remembered how to do it in Windows NT but I did dust off a book or two. I have never required a DNS server before since I only hosted a small handful of web sites. That’s changing now.
As more contacts roll in, so does the demand. This is growing so large that next year I’m considering implementing a payment tracking & billing system for the web hosting. As a matter of fact, I will create it as a shopping cart option and that is how people can come pay hosting fees if so required. I may even consider entertaining hosting shell accounts.
It has sped things up considerably both internally and externally. It definitely makes all the difference and I’ll be using DNS servers from now on. The realized convenience definitely made it worth it and made me feel as if I should have tried harder on Linux years ago to get it working.
Revisiting the past, re-visiting grex.org
I remember being in middle school / high school and wanting to see what Solaris was all about before I had access to any such non-x86 hardware. I vividly remember a box that I used to have a free shell account on, grex.org
They are still around for pretty much the same purpose. To provide the curious will a small space to learn how to setup a web site, code, and use a Linux / Unix like system. When looking at the Old Grex System Hardware it is actually quite amazing to see what the system was that they were running back then. I really didn’t think I was using hardware that old but it was a long time ago, but indeed I was! They are definitely not running old Sun hardware anymore, and that old system was due for retirement anyways. Those old 4/670s and other systems do not play that well with multiple CPUs as far as efficiency goes.
DoogieLabs website e-mail notifications has been fixed!
For the going on 10 years that I have hosted a website in some form on a server from my house, I have never had a working e-mail server. Original excuses were mostly just because I didn’t have a static IP address and the mail server was a PITA to setup in Unix / Linux. This was always kind of a bummer for me, because seeing an e-mail from me that is from my own domain name would be really nice. Present day, there are actually quite a few limitations on e-mail servers since there has been such an issue with spam. Internet providers have started to block the ports that allow people to host their own mail services. Big dinosaur free online mail services like Gmail and MSN will actually automatically classify your messages as spam from your private domain name because it is unrecognized in their system. Sometimes there are procedures in place to allow you to claim that you are indeed not a spam server. Among the requirements are things like SSL authentication for both the send and receive side of things. I definitely have NOT given up this dream as I still very much would like to get my own mail server working for a couple of reasons. The biggest reason would be because I want to own my email that only I should be able to read through and not just some other random person with unfettered access. This kind of brings me into a side rant.
I don’t like cloud mail services like Gmail and Hotmail because of their willingness to break privacy laws without considering what they are actually doing. Hackers and Police alike are able to freely grab whatever e-mail they want, and for law enforcement at least it is whenever they want. Wouldn’t you want to know if your data and messages were being snooped through? Well guess what? They have no legal right to tell you. In my world, if something I own is not in my hands, it is not in my possession, and I do not feel ownership of it. Most people can agree with this. When I look at my Gmail inbox, I see messages to and from me but owned by Google. My own mail server would stop them getting cached up there, at least as far as my Inbox goes and being on the receiving end are concerned. Yeah whomever I have exchanged messages with will have the message cached there, but it will make it much more difficult for someone to piece things together. If someone or some organization wants to investigate me and my e-mail, they’ll have to answer to me.
Oh yes you’re welcome to “call me crazy”, but Steve Wozniak (co-founder of Apple) most definitely shares the same concerns. Especially with business these days, if your secrets are buried deep within the cloud, isn’t only a matter of time before they are revealed? What if you’re subject to being targeted by hackers? Cloud computing is a risky Gamble.
Data security was actually one of the least of my concerns even with how easily obtained data could be. It’s marketing. Most people don’t think about it, but why are you able to use FaceBook for free? Why are many other services like Google, MySpace, etc. Free for use? The quick answer is advertisers, but the more revealing answer is Market Research. Market research seems to go hand in hand with cloud service providers, at least the free ones anyways. “Your” content and usage of it is logged in a Database alongside everyone elses. For what? So people could make a living selling the data in an attempt to determine the next fad, the next “big thing”. It’s completely retarded, and I refuse to participate in such shenanigans. It’s bad enough that people are bombarded with consumerist messages every 5 – 10 minutes on television, and just when you think you’ve avoided it by getting online, instead your every move is watched for the first time in history giving interactive feedback to see if the stupid advertising even got you to consider the product they were whoring out over the airwaves.
To most it is definitely not even worth the hassle to round up all their interweb content, setup a server, and take active ownership and maintenance of it. Maybe I won’t be as big online as other people are that do use those mediums to present themselves, but that’s okay. I’ve spent my entire life doing the unusual and different, why stop now when it comes my online presence?
I think people have generally lost touch with the fact that there are things called websites, and that you can go to more than just one or two. Maybe if I can find a way to setup a bookface for DoogieLabs and just have it link to the site automatically that would be fine. I really can’t be bothered with posting anything up to FB.
So there you have it, 1380 words of somewhat wisdom, LOL. I could go on and on, and I shall, but what I need to go on about from here will be needing Its own page. I hope you enjoyed, stay tuned for more.
