01.18.06

Ranting: godaddy

Posted in Programming at 2:08 am by Todd

I have been helping to create a website for my neighbors and their budding music careers. During that process, I am reminded of why web design and development is so frustrating. First, you get the pleasure of dealing with browsers and their intricacies of dealing with the state-of-the-art markup. Next, you get to deal with the fact that a lot of visitors to your site will likely be using older browsers (e.g. Netscape 4 or Internet Explorer 5). Last, you get to deal with topic of my current rant, godaddy.com.

Jer, of brookeANDjer, choose to register his domain with godaddy. After doing so, it seemed logical to go ahead and use them as the web host as well (as opposed to some others like lunarpages or dreamhost). I figured it couldn’t do much harm since most of the hosts are similar and we were not planning on doing much in terms of web applications. This assumption was wrong.

The first experience was not anything to write about but it was annoying. While Jer was walking through the setup process, they provided a very confusing set of options that were not explained well. Not only were they not explained, the page design made it hard to comprehend and make a good decision because it was way to “busy” to allow us to focus on the content (flashing ads, bright colors, etc.). So, we ended up thinking that setting up a shopping cart was a good idea. So, the gripe here is that they should provide good descriptions for items that they want you to purchase and provide an interface/design that makes it easy to see the real content of the page and not distract the user with ads and other “stuff”. Ok, no big deal, really our fault on this and it turned out ok since he got it removed from the account.

The second experience was not that big of a deal and was a result of user error. Jer was trying to get the domain redirection working (they own three domains and want all of them pointing to the same content). He messed with it enough that the site we had uploaded disappeared. It turned out that the management software got confused and started pointing the DNS to the wrong IP (not sure how their infrastructure is setup but it looks like they don’t share a single file-system). So, the files were still there, just not on the machine that DNS pointed to. No big deal, a phone call later and Jer got them to fix it.

The third experience was where it got annoying. They want users to use FTP to upload websites. This is very, very annoying because: 1) the username/password travels in clear-text, and 2) my firewall is setup so that ftp does not work (not on purpose, just chance). So, I had to use their web interface to upload and mess with files until I could find a passive-mode FTP client that allowed this access (that did not take long, just annoying that I have to use a GUI client when I just need to upload files). Ok, this is not a big problem, just annoying (have they not heard about ssh/scp???).

The fourth, and final, experience (to date) happened last night when we wanted to “go live” with the site. To provide a little context, brookeandjer wanted their music to start playing when their website was loaded. To do this, I grabbed an open-source flash-based music player. This music player uses a file format named XSPF (which is just an XML-based format) that describes a playlist. You simply embed the music player in your page and provide it a link to the xspf file and it “just works”. Or rather, it just worked in our development environment (my laptop running Linux/Apache). When I uploaded the site, the music did not play. After several minutes of trouble-shooting the issue I found was that the file could not be found. Double-checked to see that the file existed on the server using ftp (at this point, I was hoping for a shell) and the file was there and had content but using a browser I would get the error code 404 and the wonderful Microsoft IIS error page. Long story short (or rather an hour later), it turns out that godaddy does not serve files that end in xspf but will serve files that end in xml. To fix this issue, I had to change the web pages to point to an xml file and rename the xspf file to an xml file extension. This is just aweful. I would guess that they are blocking unknown file extensions from being used. But is this on purpose? If so, why? If this is not on purpose, how bad of a web host do you have to be to screw this up?

Based upon these experiences, I am officially claiming that godaddy is not a good web host.

At last, Wefald promotes KSU

Posted in Politics, SAnToS at 12:54 am by Todd

Well, I should clarify the title. President Wefald has been very outgoing about promoting events, activities, and programs within one department at KSU (hint, it is the department that holds the football program, the basketball program, and the baseball program). It seems like he is finally taking aim at promoting the research that the university does and how it benefits the state.

For several years now I have heard that the university brings in $19 of economic benefit to the state for each $1 the state provides to it. I do not know where that figure comes from since it was simply word-of-mouth during conversations with faculty. But Wefald has now told the Kansas Board of Regents that there is a $3 billion economic benefit (which gives us a $17.54 ratio, not the $19 ratio). The article does not go on to discuss how they come up with that number, but since they used it to promote the university to the board, I assume that it is fairly accurate and has a well-defined formula. So, it looks like the university has a very positive effect on the state economy. Maybe the state legislature should consider this more carefully when they are cutting the budget or choosing to provide tax incentives to new business (instead of funding the university research programs).

But with all the good news in that article (Wefald promoting research at KSU to the state and the fact that we generate a great deal for the economy) it was depressing to see that he provided the idea that teaching load is a good metric to promote. If he used it simply to say “look how much we have done with this little pot of money, imagine what we could do with more”, I applaude him. The problem I see is that it will be very easy for people to latch onto this idea such that we should strive to improve the university in that way (we should go for a higher teaching load). For example, a board member might see this and believe that we are doing just fine with our current funding so there is no reason to increase it. Without hearing what he actually said (reading a quote from the article is not the same), I should not pass judgement. But I feel fairly safe in suggesting that his message might not have been received well (I have seen him talk several times and found him lacking).

All in all, it is great to hear that President Wefald is promoting research. I just wish he would have mentioned something about the work that we are doing (highly unlikely), that the CIS department is doing (unlikely), or even the College of Engineering is doing. Maybe next time.