Tuscany in Khao Yai area of Thailand

This trend of Tuscan style buildings in the Khao Yai area of Thailand is going full bore. First there was Primo Post which is just a little place but became instantly a hit with visitors to the area. Then the owner got together with Juldis and they built Palio which is really booming. Around the same time a luxury housing project set on a golf course went up that was called Toscana Valley. Now right next to Toscana Valley is this big development called Eyrie – The Perch of Tuscany.

They are constructing a big Italian village looking project covering the side of the hill just past the entrance to Toscana. I don’t know what the prices are going to be but I did go into Toscana a few weeks ago and looked around. Very nice. Prices start at 20 million baht for a smallish villa on a small plot. Looks like Eyrie is a different style and not detached buildings.

These developments will definitely drive up land prices in the area. I saw quite a few plots being cleared, filled and leveled along the road that passes these two projects. A couple kilometers past that I saw some undeveloped land in an area called Wang Katha is going for a little over one million baht per rai. That actually seems pretty cheap compared to the prices just a few kilometers in closer which are over three million baht per rai. Somebody with money to speculate on land is going to make a killing.

Dabbling with another microblog platform

Of course Twitter is the most well known microblogging platform. I even have a Twitter account. Hey, follow me at http://twitter.com/markdgeorge ! I tweet solid gold pearls of wisdom (uh, wut?), at least when I’m in the mood. Not many followers – I just haven’t been discovered yet, that’s it.

The real reason for me and microblogging isn’t about being popular. The real reason is (keep this a secret so the big G doesn’t slap me) getting pages indexed in the search engines. I’ve heard the big G likes to scrape Twitter timelines and follow all those nofollow links to spammy pages high quality content that SEMs put up, not that I would do that. Trouble is, a lot of my tweets don’t seem to get my advertising loaded very informative pages indexed. So I started to dabble a little with another microblog – identi.ca.

I don’t actually have an account there yet (jeez, am I so lazy that I can’t even sign up and put up a few of posts) but found a few timelines that don’t seem to be indexed. Lots of timelines are indexed so I’m wondering why some are not. Maybe all it takes is a link from a blog like this one to an identi.ca timeline. Now let’s give that a little time and see what happens.

Update some web properties

With a vast inventory of web properties such as I have (heh) it’s easy to lose track of a few of them. I took a look at a couple today and they really need updating. They aren’t money sites; I use them for other purposes, but they just scream “Welcome to the last century”. Like my old site that I was once using for selling my website design services. Even if that business is still on hiatus I think I need something a little nicer and more modern looking over there. So I’ll add that to the queue of projects I hope to someday complete.

I am happy that I did complete another little project of mine that has been on the back burner for a while and got it online this week. It’s a little play on words that is an attempt to capture traffic from the fact that so many people use the name Thai Airlines when they should be using Thai Airways. I couldn’t get the precise domain name I wanted (damn domain squatters) but the one I did get should be good enough for my experiment.

Small web page indexing test case

Nothing very interesting here. Just want to see how fast this web page will get indexed if I link to it from my blog. Start the timer now.

Update 1 Oct: Well, this post has finally been indexed, a full week after it was published. But Google didn’t index the page that I linked. I wonder when that will happen.

Newest use for duct tape – iPhone4

I’m not so interested in all the fanboy versus fandroid back and forth. But Michael Arrington at TechCrunch made a valid point today when he said that you shouldn’t buy something that needs duct tape to work. That is in reference to the Consumer Reports test of the iPhone4 in which they found that if you cover the phone’s antenna with duct tape the signal strength problem seems to go away.

On the other hand, as a commenter pointed out, real men can fix anything with duct tape. So the iPhone4 is for real men. That’s a compelling argument, but slightly misguided. You see, real men can fix anything that’s broken using duct tape, but they wouldn’t buy a product with an inherent design flaw just to have to fix it with duct tape. Only fanboys do that and fanboys are not real men.

LOL at Web Hosting TOS

I was doing a little research today on secondary webhosting services for the purpose of expanding my vast network of websites and blogs. I keep my main websites on a very reliable host – DowntownHost.com, great service by great people over there, can’t say enough good things about them. But I regularly throw up “supporting” sites and throw-away domains on other hosts to spread linking across multiple C-blocks, you know how that goes (please don’t tell Google). Well, I had a chuckle at the terms of service of a couple of web hosting services today.

JustHost was looking like a reasonable second tier hosting company to add to the stable, until I got to this line in their terms of service:

“Safe lists” and “double opt-in” will be treated as spam. Any user who sends out spam will have their account terminated with or without notice.

LOL, you know of course that double opt-in is the antithesis of spam. It’s the only 100% sure way of proving that you are not spamming because someone must signup for you to send them email and then confirm that they signed up by clicking a link in a confirmation email. So you have a clear record of them doubly opting in that they can’t really dispute and claim you are spamming. I was kind enough to email JustHost to point at that either their TOS contained a glaring error or that they don’t know what they are talking about. Well, maybe I wasn’t so kind in my email after all, but the lulz were good.

So I moved to the next candidate, WebHostingPad, and they were looking ok, too. Then I got to this section of their TOS:

Credit Card Disputes/Chargebacks
WebHostingPad has a zero tolerance policy for chargebacks. Any customer who disputes a credit card payment is subject to a fine, suspension and account termination at WebHostingPad discretion. A charge of $25.00 per chargeback will be assessed to all accounts that receive a chargeback.

Ok, don’t get caught in a recursive loop there just because they seem to be. If I read that right they are going to charge you if you do a chargeback. Which means they would charge the same credit card that you just did a chargeback on? Well, then you would chargeback that charge, right? And then they would charge you again for the second chargeback? Infinite loop it seems, at least until the credit card company decides they are complete fools and does a Ctrl-C on their merchant account. This must be one of the funniest terms I have seen. I didn’t bother mailing them to let them know that I thought their terms were too funny to take them serious as a hosting provider.

Maybe I’m bottom feeding and need to move up the food chain a little for secondary hosting providers.

And an update: JustHost emailed me back and said no, that is not a mistake, they really do consider double opt-in spam. I think that is double lulz.

Drupal Mailchimp Campaign module looks promising

A few posts ago I wrote about how I implemented a Drupal newsletter archive that is based on using Mailchimp but keeps the archive on my own domain. It works fine and is easy to use – I feel like it is even a bit elegant in its simplicity. However, I feel it perhaps a bit awkward in one sense because if you decide you need to make some adjustments to your campaign you must jump over to your Mailchimp account instead of being able to control everything within you Drupal site.

Now some bright individual has kicked off development of a new Drupal module called Mailchimp Campaign to do just that, allow you to create campaigns within your Drupal site. I am just hoping that this means that newsletters will be created and archived on your Drupal site, like the way I set up my newsletter archive solution, along with giving you full control of campaigns without ever leaving your site.

Whitehouse.gov contributes some drupal modules

Whitehouse.gov might be one of the more famous Drupal based websites, certainly one of the high profile ones. I’ve just started looking around over there, think I’ll study it a bit to see what I can learn. I saw a blog post that described some Drupal modules they developed and will contribute to the Durpal community.

Being a heavily visited website they need to handle high traffic so developed a couple of modules to address scalability. Something they call “context http headers” adds meta data to content to tell servers how to handle specific pages. Hmm, sounds interesting, not clear on the details however. Another they simply call “akamai”, you know, the big content delivery network that a lot of the really big players use. So this one helps Drupal sites integrate with Akamai.

There is another module they are contributing that is designed to “enable more dynamic emails tailored to users’ preferences”. I don’t know what that means. Maybe I can experience it by joining the whitehouse.gov mailing list.

And finally there is a module for accessibility that makes sure all images can be read by screen reading software. Good stuff.

I have heard a few criticisms of Drupal along the lines of “Drupal is outdated” and wondered where that was coming from since it has become very popular only relatively recently and there are so many contributions being made all the time, like these from whitehouse.gov. Seems to me there must be hidden agendas there.

So hard to find good help – Drupal edition

That old cliche rings true time and again. I’ve been through numerous rounds of search, hire and fire lately. The one I’m writing about now is my efforts to find a good Drupal developer. This is related to the work I’ve been doing with a good friend who has an online store based on Drupal.

The original design was largely completed by a developer based in the U.S. and there were some serious ethical issues with them. It took us some time to extricate ourselves from the engagement and protect ourselves from some attempts at malicious actions. A new developer had already been engaged when I joined. They were an Indian design house. A few important features remained to be implemented so I worked with the Indian developer to get them done. The experience was frustrating. It would appear that communication had take place and the developer would report work was completed when in fact nothing at all had been done. In other cases they would go off on a tangent and do something that wasn’t even on the list of tasks.

One of the bigger frustrations was that we urgently needed to re-host the site. I had never re-hosted a Drupal site before so I left it to the “experts”. Two weeks it took them. Due to the Network Solutions hosting debacle I posted about before I had to immediately move hosts again. This time I did it myself. It only took me two days and most of that time was waiting for files to transfer on my slow and unreliable internect connection (which I have posted about numerous times before). We terminated that developer.

So we started looking for another Drupal developer. We received a number of recommendations for both domestic and offshore developers. The domestic developers were a nonstarter due to their cost. We wanted to redesign the store, nothing really major, just add improved navigation to the catalog, add some social sharing features, include mailing list signup and product ratings, that sort of thing. Estimates from developers were a couple weeks of effort. For a domestic developer that works out to $5,000 or more, a complete non-starter. Seriously, we have an existing Drupal website that needs a few modules installed and configured and a new taxonomy vocabulary created and added to the store. Thousands of dollars…end of conversation. So we went with another Indian developer that quoted under $1,000.

And the same frustrations. Work reported complete when it wasn’t. Implementations that were questionable. Answers to questions that were plain wrong. They did a SEO analysis and provided some recommendations. Some them were bad recommendations. For example, they recommended change the url alias from example.com/page to example.com/page.html. I did a little research on that and found a number of places it was discussed and nowhere that anyone could show an SEO benefit. And over at W3C they recommend against this sort of thing, saying that future-proofing your website means not being explicit about the implementation so adding a file type extension is the wrong thing to do.

If you remember my post about creating a newsletter archive you recall that I used Drupal Views to create a feed from the archive. For some odd reason the developer used a custom php script to create the feed. Sure it works, but that’s another thing to try to keep track of when it comes to maintaining the website. Keeping it all within Drupal is a much better practice.

So after two months to complete what was quoted as a two week job, and failing to complete some of the tasks, I terminated that developer. While they were flailing I began searching again and I got indications of the same kind of behaviors. I provided a spec for quote and the offshore developers (all Indian) gave back completely generic quotes that had nothing to do with the spec. One of them I replied to and asked why that had included a graphic development milestone when there were no graphics to be developed. They answered that the second payment was tied to the completion of graphics…what the? The domestic developers were a different story. They had detailed questions that indicated they had read and understood the spec and they provided details quotations. Unfortunately their costs were around $10,000 for something we expected to be about $2,000.

Since then we have gone without a “real” developer. I have been doing some development myself and the truth is once you get past the Drupal learning curve there are a lot of things you can do without custom programming, or maybe just a little bit of programming to augment or tweak existing modules. There are two open questions in my mind as a result of this experience. First is how the heck to small startups afford a full featured website? It’s easy to throw together a WordPress site that looks cool and has a lot of features but I haven’t seen one that includes a real store. I’m not talking about an affiliate website or a site selling a handful of products and taking payments with PayPal. I mean a store with many products, credit card payments, stock management, sales tax reporting, all the things a real store needs. That takes something like Drupal or maybe a closed source solution that is even more expensive because you pay for expensive software and then pay again for developers.

The other open question in my mind is what is the real state of software development in India? I worked with two developers and evaluated two others and all exhibited the same behaviors. There may have been competent programmers at those companies but there was little evidence in the work performed. The communication is deceptively poor, in that you really are convinced that requirements and tasks are understood but what they end up doing indicates a lack of understanding. I just don’t get how people have successfully used Indian developers.

Battling the jungle for connectivity

My little story about trying to stay connected in the jungle that I posted before isn’t finished yet. As I said, I’m still waiting for 3G and ADSL to both become available in my area. I need them both because neither is reliable enough to count on as my only internet connection. The last couple of weeks have been a perfect example.

Previously I was using the satellite internet system IPStar as my main internet connection. Dial up using my land line was my first level backup. Dial up using my antique Motorola cell phone was my second level backup. That isn’t EDGE or even GPRS. It’s a modem program that runs on my PC and connects via USB 1.0 to my cell phone. It’s very limited but it works in a pinch.

So a couple of weeks ago my IPStar modem quit working. Apparently the LAN port died. When I went to my first level backup I found that the phone line was dead. Great. And then thinking about my second level backup, well the driver doesn’t install on Windows 7, so I would need to use my very old and in bad shape lap top. That’s when I went out and bought an air card, which has become my main interim internet connection (more later about that).

Now the story with my land line is sort of important because in the near future I should be able to get ADSL service and that phone line is critical. After a few calls to the very unresponsive TOT call center we contacted the local lineman and he check into it. Turns out the line had be chewed through by a squirrel. Lots of them around here and they like to run along the power lines so they can travel from tree to tree without becoming vulnerable to predators on the ground. Apparently they also like to chew on the wires. So after more than a week of no land line he got it fixed.

Two days later no dial tone again. We called the TOT office and learned that a truck had struck a pole on the highway and taken out a major trunk running to this area. So my land line was down again, for another week.

A week later, no dial tone again. I followed my wire from my house to where it connects to the main and I see that right at the junction box it is broken and laying on the ground. I bet the squirrel go it again. So as of right now I have my air card and no backup. And I’m thinking that having ADSL service isn’t going to do me much good because my land line will be down so often. This month was about 75% downtime.

My hope is that I get ADSL as primary and that I can get a reasonable uptime, with 3G as backup. ADSL is a prepaid monthly plan. The 3G air card is a pay as you go plan so it is a good backup solution.