yon Leveron blog

I’m impressed with the amount of traction that WordPress (WP) has within the world these days; the idea of a hosted site at .com and a self-hosted option via .org has always appealed to me, ever since I learned of WP. “Code is Poetry”, indeed.

http://wordpress.org/development/2009/11/upcoming-wordcamps-3/ lists upcoming WordCamps; these conferences have “tracks” like many other get-togethers, and can include topics for end users (bloggers), developers of various pieces, administrators, and many other areas. They’ve seemingly designed these very intelligently, and kept the prices extremely reasonable; no wonder they are still enjoying huge yearly growth.

I’m especially impressed with the live video stream planned for at least one of these events : http://phxwordcamp.com/live-video-stream/ though I may well be able to still make an event live this year.

While I’d really love to hit up the Bangkok version with my buddy Dong Limsawas, I don’t think this is likely to happen due to budgetary constraints

These camps have been and are being held worldwide, here are just a few more listed for the near future. If you are at all interested in blogging, whether for business or pleasure, the learning opportunities seem too good to pass up as they’ve been made very affordable, which speaks well of their intent; it’s also savvy.

WordCamp Phoenix November 13 Phoenix, Arizona

WordCamp Victoria November 14  Victoria, British Columbia

WordCamp New York November 14–15 New York, New York

WordCamp Bangkok November 15  Bangkok, Thailand

WordCamp Peru November 28  Lima, Peru

WordCamp Orlando December 5 Orlando, Florida

WordCamp Boston January 23  Boston, Massachusetts

WordCamp Indonesia January 30  Jakarta, Indonesia

WordCamp Toronto March 27–28 Toronto, Ontario

Good luck in scheduling yourself into something that could enhance your life; I will be a late attendee if able to make one this month, due to recent operations (alas). /Cheers!

Techie alert – sometimes it is helpful to see how your web site’s SSL certificate looks from other folks / outside.  These tools may help.

SSL Checker – SSL Certificate Verify.

SSL Certificate Tester – Check Certificates.

SSL Certificate Checker – CodeFromThe70s.org

I did not include gimped tools from the Thawte / Verisign company, as they only check their own certs.

These tests are done over the ‘net so may not be suitable for internal / LAN type sites.  But they also don’t require anyone to have tech knowledge, or make you use an openssl binary to connect manually from the command line.  Nor do they require you to bug anyone, asking if they can browse to it successfully, heh.  By all means, as always if you have a good link for other resources, just comment and I’ll add it.

J.

P.S.  For simple encryption without needing to verify anything but domain ownership, it’s pretty hard to beat Godaddy.  If you are interested in cheap, non business class, I’d recommend you scout out any of the $12.99 per year promo discount codes for them; they were already significantly cheaper than most other folks at $30 per year, but $13 is better.  Yep.  A company I dealt with last month paid on the order of $200 per cert, in bulk prepaid lots no less (!) for effectively the same cert from one of the original vendors.  That’s just not necessary in 2009 folks.

Forward looking folks : Check the https website cert that the entire WordPress.Com site is running on.  It’s a Standard SSL Wildcard, and it costs them under $200 per year to secure thousands of subdomains such as https://datasecurityclass.wordpress.com/2009/03/30/ihors-ssl-topic/ WordPress corporate (not .org, .com) felt it was fine to go with the Standard, and I agree.

It’s not so much that it costs less per year than the “Deluxe” SSL Wildcard, but if you check, the Deluxe has a max 3 year lifespan; their cert is good for 5 years total.  In essence, they got 5 years of SSL capability (trusted by that same 99.3% of browsers as other folks tout) for actually tens of thousands of sites, for $900 or less.  I get no commission from GoDaddy, but I think there’s a reason they’re beating the heck out of the rest of the industry in new SSL cert issuance.

In EV land, 2 years is the max, and there is no wildcard option due to tighter security requirements (as well as simple business sense, ahem).  EV makes great sense if you’re taking credit card orders on a screen; that should hopefully only be one website.

There are a lot of options out there when you’re about to choose a web host.

On the low end, where I live (for my personal sites, at least!) nearly all are “oversold”. If they weren’t, you really would not like the pricing. A related example : shop around, check with any internet pipe provider, and ask them what a guaranteed, non-shared pipe the size of your home broadband would cost per month. Be prepared for some sticker shock.

Low cost and good for many users, i.e. casual – this is where I plug my current personal web host.

A step up in price, and potentially performance : Grid model http://mediatemple.net/webhosting/gs/

As soon as I find some good comparison article out there, I’ll no doubt link it.  So far in 10 months time, I’ve been pretty happy at Dreamhost, with multiple users and domains all in that same < $10 per month package.

DH does offer free web hosting for non-profit groups, which I think is nice of them.  Additionally, GoDaddy offers SSL certs for free to open source projects. They’re who I bought the plain-but-functional SSL cert for this domain through (you’ll notice that you are on a secure site, if you register with this blog; during login, etc. you will be on ‘secure’ pages).

General disclaimer : pretty much any link to any sales site, web hosts included, gives the referrer (your blogger, in this case) some form of payout just for bringing you to their door.  A yup, I admitted it.

Random additional “General” blog topic : http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2009/08/07/cash-for-clunkers/ was pretty interesting. I’m definitely not driving my 13 year old vehicle much these days.