TangentIdea

What would people advise for server-side filtering? I still haven't figured out how to use SpamAssasin, but I think that it would be worth my time. I'm moving all my family's email accounts from our ISP to my tangentidea.net server, and we depend on Earthlink for catching the large majority of our spam. Earthlink is very nice in that regard -- it nails close to 95% of the spam. -Ryan

It happens. It happens a lot, for me. Unfortunately, there's almost nothing that you can do about it. Oh well. :-/

I had an absolutely awful experience with one webhost once. The support people were both incompetent and rude. (One without the other is bad enough -- combined, it's a deadly combination.) Their support staff hardly knew how to run their own system. When I was having a problem with cPanel (it wouldn't work well on my old computer), they said, you need to get DSL and you need to get a new computer (but not a Mac, because, "well, Macs have serious flaws" Mad!!! ). One day, we received an email which appeared to be from an old customer of theirs who wanted information on how to sign up again. Well, I was just getting over the "serious flaws" incident, and I was still pretty ticked. I hit "Reply All," sending it to the intended inbox and this person -- I flamed the hosting company pretty nastily. Weeeell... next thing I know, our account is suspended. Little did I know, the email address that this person sent his message to was a MAILING LIST FOR ALL OF THE COMPANY'S SUBSCRIBERS! My flame email hit that same mailing list. Whoops. The hosting company threatened legal action, but fortunately, the company president is a much better man than I and let me go. Still, that was a baaaad idea on my part. Ain't doin that again. So anyway... heh, after that, anything looks good. But yeah, I've been pretty happy with TCH so far. The Reseller account is worth its weight in gold. (I don't know how much it weighs, but... oh, you get my point...) No, I don't think it'd be a good idea to compile bad stories of other companies. It cheapens TCH's image. Their reputation will get around. -Ryan

Y'know that little "TCH" icon that shows up beside the url on the browser? How would one go about getting one of those? (I mean, not necessarily "TCH" -- it is gorgeous and all, but I was thinking of something a little more personal. ) Is there something in the cPanel that I'm missing, or is that something that would be available through my domain registrar? -Ryan

Have a look at my photo gallery -- http://www.ryanmast.com/mycrazyfriends Image compression is NOT bad. My pictures are generally pretty small and well-compressed, but you can still see what's going on. A problem that some new web designers have is that they are a too afraid of compression. The human eye can fill in the details where the actual image leaves off. As far as putting the page together goes, I just dragged and dropped the images from the folder into Claris HomePage. Works fine. Probably not the most efficient way to do it, but it works. -Ryan

I think what first drove me was the incredible geek status available for saying, "here, check out my website..." That's what hooked me. What kept me is the money (and the hours) -- it's a whole lot better than working at McDonalds all through high school. Thumbs Up -Ryan

My car is a '92 Ford Aerostar. Whoooo, baby, is that ride a chick magnet! But hey, it weeds out the golddiggers -- any girl who gets in that bus is in it for me, not the car. Haven't learned to parallel park yet. That should be fun. -Ryan

Never mind, I finally figured out how to do it myself. -Ryan

Yes, PHPwebhosting does offer SSH access. Now what? -Ryan

My TotalChoice acct has Cpanel 3, I believe. My other account (with PHPwebhosting) doesn't -- they write their own control panel. (Which is very nice, btw...) So are you saying there's a way to do it from w/in cPanel? -Ryan

Does anyone know of an easy way to transfer files directly between two webservers? I'm moving another one of my sites to the TCH servers, but I have a large amount of audio on the site (>100mb). I'm on dialup, so it would be a royal pain to upload all those files again. I poked around on the ResourceIndex site, but all I could find was a perl FTP program for $25. Sooo... short of just getting a browser-based command-line shell and executing the FTP command that way, I don't have any other great ideas. Any suggestions? -Ryan