blog

Name Your Price: Webhosting for those without deep pockets

Posted by

Well, I never heard of a ‘Name Your Price’ Web hosting. So I decided to try it out and see what the buzz was about. I went to their webpage where they had a “Name Your Price” form, filled it out and sent it off. I decided to go for a quotation rather than offer them something, and see if they would take it. Still waiting for the email. Will add their quotation below.

Allowing your customers to decide how many services you needed for yourself, instead of letting a company decide, and offer different packages based on what they think the ‘average’ customer might need and how affordable it might be, is a neat idea!

Customers are in fact all different and require quite different elements to compose their website. I only have niggle: what if a customer’s needs change, eg. they suddenly need MySQL as they have now got a blog. Will that function be available?

Sponsored by Unified Hosting.

Warren Buffett: What’s your email address?

Posted by

I’ve been asked this interesting question: “If you could get hold of one email address, whose would it be and what would you send them a message about?”

If I could get hold of one email address, I’d like to get Warren Buffett’s. As an investor, you have to admire his tremendous investing and management style, not to mention his huge record of returns for Berkshire-Hathaway since he took over nearly 40 years ago.

WikiPedia writes of his approach as:

  1. Generals: undervalued securities that possess margin of safety and meet expected return-to-risk characteristics
  2. Arbitrages: company events that are not related to broader market changes, such as mergers and acquisitions, liquidation, etc.
  3. Controls: build sizeable holdings, ally with other shareholders or employ proxies to effect changes in companies

So if I could email him, I’d interview him about the above. I’d be interested to look at the way he does research into these three aspects. A large part of his style of investing is his ability to see value where the general investor does not, so I’d be inclined to ask him how he finds such value, how he manages his team of managers, and what his defnition of ‘margin of safety’ is.

Perhaps his most notable aspect of his success must be: The key to successful management has to be knowing what you can do, as well as what you can’t. For example, email marketing and the whole internet thing is an area of business that he himself has avoided. However, even if he didn’t have much clue about it, I’m sure that he’d employ others who did. As such, he really stays out of day to day management, preferring the original owners, management and staff at the companies he buys to stay in place.

Whose email address would you like? Why? I’m going to tag another blog, and see their answer… My chosen blog: JohnChow‘s.

In the meantime, what’s your reply? Reply in the comments or register for an account!

This post brought to you on behalf of MindComet.

Gallarific: does this flexible gallery script make your gallery terrific?

Posted by

Over the past few years, I’ve experimented with three different PHP photogalleries: Coppermine, Gallery, and some of the various PHP plugins available for Wordpress. Each of them has strong points, but weakness that make them problematic.

Coppermine is poor at uploads, while Gallery has more features, including an appropriate tool to upload stuff (but it’s a bugger to configure in an attractive way). I don’t like the Wordpress plugins because most of them have very limited features on the other hand, they’re fine for a blog, but nothing more. They certainly can’t handle larger photo websites… Enter a new PHP image and photo gallery script – Gallarific.

I’ve been trying out the demo at their website and it is very snappy by comparison with some of my experiments before. Though there are few themes yet, I suspect that the software will easily manage themes. There is even a simple PHP script to check that your server can run the software.

If you have an existing blog or website, you should find integration relatively straightforward, using the in-built template editor. Given the efficiency of the scripts, any uploaded photos will be resized for three views: thumbnail, medium view and large view. This should ensure that your gallery loads much faster as images will be saved in more appropriate sizes.

Additional features will include zipping larger numbers of photos, tags, search function, gallery stats, slideshows, commenting (a la Wordpress) with approval, visitor albums, and registered accounts, so that other users may share the upload and access of your website.

It is not Opensource, nor free, but if you are looking for an efficient alternative, and you don’t worry so much about the financial side of running your website (perhaps your website revenue supports such a purchase), then this might be an appropriate way to run a larger photo gallery on a shared server.

This post has been brought to you by Gallarific.com.