New website

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I was excited to get a chance to work on a new website off/on for the last few months. The Salem Clinic website hasn’t been redone since 2001 and needed a face lift. Thanks to help from members of the Open Designs community it was finally completed in December 0f 2007 and launched in January 2008.  It is all pretty standard PHP on the back end and use jQuery on the front end. WordPress handles all of the content, links, and blog. I’ve covered WordPress as a CMS before if you missed it.

Old Site

Old Website

New Site

New Website

The $7.5 million dollar host

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Thumbs way up!I read a lot of articles and blogs everyday using Google Reader. I had about 500 articles this morning, but this was definitely one of the more interesting ones. Dreamhost accidentally billed every single customer as if today was 12/31/2008 because somebody fat fingered the manual running of the automatic billing system. In all, customers were overcharged by $7,500,000 in just a few hours. Wow. Wrong button buddy. Sadly (to me at least), he blames the programmer for letting him make such a mistake. This is why client side validation is so important I guess and a few extra “Are you sure?” prompts can’t hurt. If nothing else, they are being transparent about the whole thing, which is good and more then I can say about some companies *cough* Prosper *cough*.

Not that I have room to talk. I’ve been known to shutdown an entire server room with one very well misplaced footstep behind the server cabinets. The still of the air and silence was deafening to say the least.

Update #1: Dreamhost obviously hasn’t learned their lesson on humility.
Photo courtesy of whitehouse.gov

Gaming StumbleUpon?

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Is someone trying to game StumbleUpon for a profit? or to cost someone money?

I was stumbling this morning while working on a problem in my application when I came across a stumble to NewEgg.com that piqued my curiosity. The URL looked like this…

Gaming StumbleUpon ExampleIt would seem to me that the user that discovered the page intentionally put in some kind of Google Adwords referral code. Why would someone try to do that? Would it make them money? Would it cost NewEgg money? Both? Neither?

I reviewed the user page of the StumbleUpon user that discovered this site, and found that his only other discovery was to cabelas.com where AdWords code is in the URL also.

I started a discussion on OpenDesigns.org, and as of this writing, have not received any feedback yet. Gaming “Social” websites is nothing new. Many a site has been banned from Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, and dZone for questionable practices and spam. I’m not sure that something nefarious is going on here, but regardless my curiosity has been peaked.

So tell me readers (both of them), am I onto something here?