I’ve been wanting to get back into blogging on a more regular basis. I’ve been working on a lot of cool things, and when I feel like I have time, I jot down some ideas and create them as drafts here. They have yet to come to fruition… That’s about to change.

I started the new year off on a good foot, but got a little sidetracked in my pet project of building a theme. I’ll have some smaller pieces of tutorials on that as I continue working on it. This design is still very much a work in progress, so if you’re reading via a feed reader, you might want to take a look every now and then and see if I’ve done any progress to it.

After I got the pet project going, I wanted to move hosts. If you aren’t aware, I’ve been with DreamHost for years, but after the last few months, I’ve been noticing their VPS services were slow. After several times of contacting their support, I was basically told it was WordPress related. Long story short, I decided that I had enough of dealing with the “company” line and decided to find a different host. About 10 minutes later, I was shocked to see that someone was raving about a new host they just got on via Twitter. I decided to take a look and was instantly surprised. It was just what I was looking for.

Enter Digital Ocean

Digital Ocean is more of a DIY host, where you need to decide what OS you want, configure SSH access, build a firewall, install the various languages you need, and so forth. I’ve tried some of these before, but I was too inexperienced to really give it a shot at running my own server. These days, I’m in servers all the time setting them up and configuring them. This gave me the confidence that I needed to decide to go this route again. But if you’re not like me, and you need a little extra help (or want to just follow some good tutorials to get you going quicker), Digital Ocean has tons, and they will help you out if you’re stuck, so you can have a fast secure server at your finger tips.

Do they sound good yet? Well, if they don’t, consider this. Where else can you get a server starting at 512MB, 1 Core CPU, 20SSD Disk space, and 1TB of bandwidth for a whooping $5.00 a month??? Can you believe that?? Me neither!! I don’t know how they can afford to do it like that, but they just got a customer for life! (or at least until they get bought out and change plans on us) One cool thing I really enjoy about Digital Ocean is that they allow you to create an image. This allows you to setup a typical LAMP web server, add your SSH keys, firewall, etc. and when you need to start up a new server, just apply the image to it! We used this method for imaging classrooms in schools and such, and I always wondered when it would get to web hosting companies.

2013: The Year of Goals

Now that I’ve got a new host, WordPress is up and running, my blog is over here, I’ve got everything setup how I want, I’m now able to start focusing on the things I want to do here. I’ve always tried to start out each year with a list of goals for this site, some years I made them up here, others, not so much. I’ve also started, restarted, stopped, and started up blogging on here so much, rather than dedicate a post to starting up, I’m just going to continue blogging.

Of course this post wouldn’t be complete without listing the goals out that I’d like to do this year.

Goals for 2013:

• Complete my current theme
• Start/Complete (since I’ve already got this in progress) foundation_s, based off of _s and Foundation from Zurb.
• Document some of the cool things I’ve been working on (things like deploying WordPress applications, moving to SASS for writing CSS, new business ventures, etc.)
• Launch my new business venture in the first quarter of 2013.

That’s it for the goals. I’ll try to do a blog post on each goal every month, keeping myself accountable with how they are coming along. I’m still very much in the process of figuring them all out, so we’ll see if it’s just one post on all of them each month, or if I separate them into multiple posts.

And of course, I’ll be publishing some tutorials here. I’ve got about 10 different tutorials half-written, so I’ll make sure that the code examples are updated and the content is still relevant and start posting those as well.

Until next time, thanks for tuning in!