8 Ways to Sunday

…. deep in the heart of Texas! I’ve completed the move to TextDrive, and if you can read this then the domain name change has successfully propagated to your DNS server.

8 Ways to Sunday and Low Pass Filter now reside on “One,” the name for one of the two TextDrive servers housed in The Planet’s Dallas, TX data center. “One” has dual Xeon 3.06GHz processors (1MB Cache / 533MHz FSB), 6GB RAM, and four 73GB 10,000 RPM SCSI drives in a RAID 5 array (plus a fifth for backup). It has a twin named Barclay with equally impressive specs and performance to match. These two BSD-powered beasts are the workhorses of TextDrive, hosting the sites of the first 200 members (the so-called VC 200) and however many have joined up since the service kicked off early this month.

It’s been a big relief to make this move after the performance problems that had plagued my previous hosting provider. I’m grateful for all the help they provided to get me started almost a year ago, but it was time to move on. This site has grown up quite a bit since its inception. 8 Ways to Sunday now averages about 3,000 unique visitors and 75-80,000 hits per month since I started posting more useful, truly original content a few months ago. That’s nothing compared to the A-listers of the blogosphere, but it was enough of an increase for this tiny site that I needed a more robust hosting solution.

So far, I’m loving TextDrive. My hosting plan easily meets my current needs and leaves me with plenty of storage space (1GB) and bandwidth (10GB/month) to try new things. I’m not sure where I’ll go from here, but I’ve got a few good ideas. It all depends on how much spare time and energy I can muster. Stay tuned…

Today I’m moving from the BloggedUp server in Great Britain to a TextDrive server named “One” at The Planet’s data center in Dallas, TX.

Once the move is complete, I’ll change the DNS data for my weblog to point to TextDrive’s name servers. It’ll take 24-72 hours for this change to propagate through the Net so that everyone is seeing the site at its new location. Meanwhile, I’m not going to post anything else new.

See you in Texas!

Update: Change of plans — the final switch has been delayed until Monday night.

Fox Searchlight Pictures’ Searchlab brings you a short film about a man whose life is ruined by spam.

This darkly comic story contains brief nudity and adult themes. Click at your own risk if you’re reading this from work.

Is “Google” still capitalized when it’s something you do, not something you use? Even the authorities can’t seem to agree on a consistent rule.

The Q & A on registered trademarks at the web site of the Chicago Manual of Style comes down on the side of capitalization. Meanwhile WordWizard answers the Google-verb capitalization question with a quote from the very same famous style manual, this time declaring the answer to be a very firm “it depends”:

Nouns, adjectives and verbs derived from personal, national or geographical names are often lowercased when used with a specialized meaning. According to some authorities, however, certain of these ought to be capitalized. Authors and editors must decide for themselves, but whatever choice is made should be followed consistently throughout a work.

— Chicago Manual of Style, 14th Ed. 7.49

Well, glad we’ve gotten that all settled.

For the purposes of clarity and readability, this weblog will not be capitalizing the verb form of “google.” Verbs are not traditionally capitalized, and doing so breaks with reader expectations of what a sentence should look like. This decreases readability and may cause re-reading. It’s also a sign of the creeping trademark fascism that corporations are trying to impose upon the natural evolution of the English language, but that’s a rant for another time.

As noted in a comment to an earlier post, a Textpattern user named “Greenrift” replied to my announcement of Jim Riggs’s TextilePHP with instructions on how to hack the new code into the Textpattern CMS.

TextilePHP is a direct port of Brad Choate’s Textile 2 Perl module. It adds several features and enhancements not included in Dean Allen’s original Textile implementation. With the release of Textpattern γ1.19, I felt that Greenrift’s hack warranted promotion to a full post. I hope that this will both promote awareness of Textpattern and encourage the eventual inclusion of the TextilePHP code into the official release.