Summer is on its way - albeit not today

With summer on its way (its raining today, but I am assurred the English summer will be here soon) its that time of year again that I wonder if the old server sitting in the corner in the sun will survive just one more year.

To quote a blog post - "Note to future IT hopefuls:Computers make heat. Heat is BAD."

PCs, servers especially run hot, all the time, there are warning stickers on some of the servers I have seen that say 'Do not run this server with this side panel off'.
Every time you Server/PC shuts down due to heat (called a thermo-shutdown, its normally automatic once Processor gets to 60+ deg C) it looses 1 yr of its life and they are not designed to last forever (well some are - HP competiton )

So with a scorching summer on its way here are a few tips to keep it cool, (note they dont run under water);
- Air con is good, it may be hard on the electricity bill and maybe the environment but the cost of downtime and early server retirement may be worth it)
- Keep access to the servers limited, I have seen a server room door left open to cool the rest of the office as there was only one air con unit in the place and in the open plan space
- You could look at virtualising some of the server functions - consolidating the number of machines running your company will mean less heat created etc, leaving the released servers to be used as backups?
- Keep the severs in the same cooled or at least well vetilated room, this aids security as well.

I currently have 4 servers in the crypt of a church....cool no really it is, as the room is below ground level under the chapel it is naturally cooler down there. With a portable air con unit on standby incase it gets too hot, the room sits at around 35 de C, which is probably a little warm, but the aircon cant cool it any more than 30 deg C as the heat outlet pipe heats the room up as its cooling. However the system works well.

Make sure you have a backup system in place as the heat can kill: http://h40059.www4.hp.com/campaigns/golddust/index.htm

If you need any advice on server virtualisation, cooling or security feel free to drop me an email craig.hogan@chillfire.co.uk

goodluck with the summer heat.

new google product

I have just found http://www.google.com/tisp/ it looks like a great concept for broadband, and with google backing it all the way, who knows how far it will go.

goodluck with the free 8mbps 'trickle line'

SEO forums - worth weight in gold

Well with the development of the new CMS out of the way I am back into the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) forums (www.v7n.com).

This is a great place to find information out about the how-to side of good/ethical SEO.
The moderators do a great job of 'keeping it clean' and people are quite open about how they do what they do so well.

check out my latest post http://www.v7n.com/forums/google-forum/57537-thanks-v7n-1-site-links-now-has-pr2.html

Any SEO benchmarking required?

freelancers.net profile

I have been using freelancers.net for a number of years and finally have got around to posting about them.

The site is a very good place for freelancers to start looking for projects, jobs and even business alliances.
It has a simple layout and a good reputation amongst reelance professionals, it is mainly geared towards IT/design etc, however there are always jobs from other sectors posted.

my profile is http://craighogan.freelancers.net

goodluck on the job hunt.
//craig

Yeah Nah Umm Bro - more T-shirts

I have just added a few new Yeah Nah Umm Bro designs and products!

I saw couple of guys at the Walkabout Embankment (London) wearing them, great to see!

remember to 'keep speaking kiwi'

Paypal will be a bank

I heard on the news this morning that PayPal will become a real bank, with offices in Luxemburg.

Its amazing that this was started form nothing a few years ago.
Looks like Yahoo is onto a winner here.

Bring on the PayPal credit card.

new ocre CMS on the way

I am about to release the latest version of ocre CMS.
There is new functionality along with a new database system, some of the older versions (1.x) are not compatible at the moment, but am happy to port them across if you want need to (your webserver will nee to be upgraded - see below).

Ocre is now asp.net 2.0 compatible and implements some of the new Atlas toolkit controls, these help to create a really nice interface and more of a desktop feel to the admin tools.

Some of the new features:
- Multi content ability, you can have differnet content on the same URL depending on where people have come from, this is perfect for 'content specific Landing pages'.
- News feed reader and editor, add newsd directly form any number of RSS/XML feeds.
- Social Bookmark me - using addthis.com
- Customer reporting, more in depth tracking of people using your site.
- E-commerce package plugin for ProTx, take payments online via ProTx (paypal as well)
- Multi level navigation, up to 3 levels deep
- Cross browser drop-down menus, and content

All old features have been updated to use the new framework and atlas
I have not used the public release of the Atlas toolkit as this needs to be installed on the hosts server and as most of you are hosted on remote servers the controls (and site) will not work.

What about the speed, there as never been an issue with the speed of the content engine in ocre, however with the internet/computers getting faster I am looking at making the engine more efficient.

I will keep you all posted about this.

If there are any issues with your current ocre install or if you would like information please drop me an email ocre@chillfire.co.uk .

regards,
Craig

Yeah Nah Umm Bro

Kiwi T-shirts for teh international Kiwi....


http://chillfire.spreadshirt.co.uk


Yeah Nah Umm Bro!
Speakg Kiwi For Ages

new google analytics

Google launched a new Beta version of their web analytics tools.

The interface is very 'google', they are using the latest flash plugin to display graphs, images etc.
It is completely different from the old one, however it is very functional and with the move of 'seldom used' menu items the experience is much cleaner and easier to use.

Will be interesting to see what new tools are added before the Beta version is released 'live'