Every year or two I like to order a new dedicated server and migrate all my stuff to it. This gets me newer hardware and software, lets me customize the hardware to my current needs, and gives me a chance to fix any mistakes I made with the configuration of the previous server. Plus I often save some money.

I just placed my order with SoftLayer for my latest server and am so super excited to start working on it. I remembered to check for any specials, and was lucky to grab an awesome one that has saved me some cash while letting me get a way beefier server than I had intended.

The configuration I settled on ended up being $550/month cheaper with the promo code and some luck (sometimes you get better than ordered, because they don’t have what you ordered available). That is a savings of $6,600 for the first year! Even better, it ended up being $10/month cheaper than my existing server, so I’m getting a much more powerful machine for $120/year less.

Specs of the new server:

• OS: CentOS 6.0 (64-bit)
• CPU: 2 x Intel Xeon-Westmere 5620-Quadcore [2.4GHz]
• RAM: 12GB DDR3
• Hard drive: 2 x 100GB SSD in RAID 1

I better get configuring. I’m only saving money if I quickly migrate to the new server.

I’ve been hard at work on a new project, but got temporarily distracted by the horribleness that was the Corban Works website. I’ve had a rough idea of what I wanted to do with it for quite a while, but couldn’t get myself to devote the time to it.

So I finally buckled down and knocked out the new design in a couple days. It is pretty basic, but I like it a lot. The whole point of the Corban Works site is to showcase all my websites, so I switched from a blog format to a gallery format. It makes the page colorful and fun.

I also added some updated/new icons that show up over certain sites. This is all controlled from a single config file that defines all my sites, when they were created, and when they were last updated. This means I only have to update a single spot and the updated/new icons move themselves.

Anyways, I’m pretty happy with it.

I often search for recipes online and end up at sites like Allrecipes.com. The recipes I find often have terrific reviews and star ratings. The problem, however, is that people are dumb.

You see, people have a bad habit of writing reviews along the lines of:

Oh my gosh this is the most amazing recipe in the world! My family loves it! My dog loves it! My neighbors love it! Oh by the way I didn’t actually follow the recipe. I made so many changes that my review is completely irrelevant.

Drives me crazy. I follow the 5 star recipe that has 4,000 reviews and it turns out awful because nobody is actually reviewing the recipe.

The solution? Make my own recipe site, Recipe Kabob!

Under U.S. copyright law, recipes can’t be copyrighted. Sure, you can copyright your pictures of your recipe and copyright your substantial descriptions of the recipe, but the recipe itself can’t be copyrighted. This means anyone can copy any recipe and it isn’t actually stealing. Awesome, no?

So I’ve started a recipe site. I don’t want people’s comments or reviews. I don’t care what they did different. The recipes I list are great as-is and don’t require modification. Think of it like a cookbook.

If you see something you like, feel free to take it. :)

I’m very excited to announce the launch of my latest site: namegenerator.in. I know what you are thinking, “oh geez, another name generator site..”, but this one is different!

Instead of just listing a bunch of fake information, it displays it on a business card. There are several business card designs (made by my beautiful wife!). You can flip through the cards by clicking left/right arrows, get new fake details by clicking an icon, or get a permalink that lets you send the info to a friend or post online.

You can also generate details for specific states. The site tries to detect your state automatically. So if I go to the page, it automatically selects Connecticut because that is where I live.

As an added bonus, try entering the Konami code.

Anyways, check it out and let me know what you think: http://namegenerator.in

I occasionally need to know if my computer is 32-bit or 64-bit. The process is always a bit annoying and often involves a fair amount of Googling, so I’ve created a website that just tells you what you are using: 32-bit or 64-bit.

I’ve done a fair amount of testing and it seems to be pretty accurate. I think it will work for at least 95% of the people that use it.

Anyways, let me know if you run into a problem with it or if you find it useful!

I recently stumbled on the WP Smush.it plugin. It is a neat plugin that takes your images and automatically uploads them to the Smush.it web service so that your images are always nice and optimized. The problems with it are: A) it uploads all your images to a third party, which is slow and clumsy, B) it makes your images subject to the privacy policy and terms of service of Smush.it, which is often undesirable, and C) it can be slow if you have a pile of images to optimize.

So I created a derivative of WP Smush.it that runs entirely on your local server using littleutils (which I blogged about previously).

CW Image Optimizer (available from the WordPress plugin site) works just like WP Smush.it except it never uploads your images to a third party. Images are automatically and losslessly optimized using the opt-png, opt-jpg, and opt-gif programs provided by littleutils.

The downside is it requires Linux and littleutils, which most people won’t have unless they put forth the effort to install them. I plan on creating some step-by-step installation instructions for common Linux distributions in the near future, but in the meantime I have a great plugin to use on all my blogs, and because it is in the WordPress repo, I can easily push updates to all my blogs.

Anyways, if you use it, let me know what you think. I’m excited about actively developing this app to make it a great tool for everyone.

For my website-of-the-month for July, I’ve decided to turn my newly gained obsession with Perler beads into a full blown website.

8-bit Sprites, just launched, is going to feature a new Perler bead sprite every week. Each sprite post includes instructions on how to make it on your own, or you can leave a comment for a chance to win it.

This site was a ton of fun to make. Aside from making a couple dozen Perler sprites already, I also wrote some fun code to make the maintenance of this website easier:

First, I wrote a page that lets me fairly easily create an XML document that defines the colors and positions of the beads required for each design. It still takes a few minutes to manually translate an image into an XML document, but it is much easier than doing it completely by hand.

Next, I wrote a custom WordPress plugin that reads this XML document. It counts how many beads of each color are needed, how big of a pegboard you’ll need, and generates a pattern image that can be used by anyone that wants to create the sprite on their own. This is really cool because it lets me add new features to the patterns without having to update old posts.

The plugin uses custom shortcodes to make it super easy to create my weekly posts. One shortcode simply takes the path to the XML document as a parameter, and uses that to display all the details about the sprite. Another shortcode makes it easy to include consistent contest rules/guidelines on each post. It also uses the post date to automatically close the contest each week.

I already have a thousand ideas on how to make this site better, but I wanted to get the bare minimum done so I’d at least get it out the door and published before the end of the month.

A long time ago I created a temporary email service (Fake Mail Generator) using an open source script. Shortly after, my shared hosting provider shut me down because it was using too many resources.

This weekend I finally got it up and running again, and I’d like to share the basics of how I did it. You’ll still have to figure some parts out on your own, but at least you’ll have a basic idea of what to do.

First, I needed somewhere to host my email service. I know from experience that some hosts aren’t too pleased with this type of service, so I didn’t want to put it on my main dedicated server. Instead, I found a great VPS (virtual private server) at AlienVPS for only $6.75/month. I get shell access, plenty of disk space and bandwidth, and 512MB of RAM.

There is always the risk that they’ll decide to cancel my service without warning, so I store all my code (including config files and database schema) in a git repository. I think it’d take me less than an hour to get completely up and running on a new host if I had to.

Second, I needed a domain name to use for the email service. These need to be changed every now and then, so I couldn’t use the fakemailgenerator.com domain. I’ve had problems with domain registrars in the past getting upset over my usage of the domain, too, so I went to a registrar I’ve never used before. I chose Gandi.net because they have a history of standing up for the rights of their users, and I registered teleworm.com.

Last, I needed a way to process incoming email. This was the part that took a little effort to figure out because I lost the original instructions to the open source script I was using.

The first step was to install postfix. I’m using CentOS so this was as easy as yum install postfix.

Next, some basic configuration. In /etc/aliases I had to add a mailbox that sends the mail to a PHP script. For me this looks like:

fmg: "| php -q /www/fakemailgenerator/mail-handler.php"

This tells postfix to send all mail addressed to fmg to a PHP script called mail-handler.php. Once I made this change to aliases, I had to run newaliases (no parameters required).

Next I needed to setup a catch-all for my domain. This is done in /etc/postfix/virtual:

@teleworm.com fmg

This tells postfix to accept mail for anything@teleworm.com, and send it to the fmg account I configured in /etc/aliases.

If your /etc/postfix/main.cf doesn’t already have it set, it needs the following lines:

alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases
alias_database = hash:/etc/aliases
smtpd_banner = mail.teleworm.com ESMTP $mail_name
myhostname = mail.teleworm.com
virtual_alias_domains = teleworm.com
virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual

Last, run the following to enable your new configuration (assuming postfix is already running):

postmap /etc/postfix/virtual
postfix reload

Yay! We now have mail addressed to any address at teleworm.com going to a PHP script. Lucky for me, I already have a basic handler. Unluckily for you, you don’t.

To point you in the right direction, this is how you get the content of the email into a variable called $email:

$fd = fopen("php://stdin", "r");
$email = "";
while (!feof($fd)&&!(strlen($email)>=5000)) {
 $email .= fread($fd, 1024);
}
fclose($fd);

Once you have the email in a variable, you can parse out the to, from, and the body. You can save it to a database or save to a file or do whatever you want. You can check if the to address has been activated, and if not, you can cause a “user not found” message to be sent by doing something like die(’550 User not found.’). It is entirely up to you.

Anyways, it was fun to get going again, and I have a lot of ideas on how to improve the code I already have.

I’ve been with GoDaddy for many years. Their domains are inexpensive when you use a coupon, you can get cash back through FatWallet, and you get free DNS service.

So why would I move all of my 45+ domains to non-GoDaddy registrars? Here are a few reasons (in no particular order):

1. I hate their advertising. Although they’ve gotten better over the past year, GoDaddy still has highly inappropriate advertising, including many “banned from TV”-style commercials. That isn’t what I’m looking for in a registrar, and it makes it really hard to recommend the company to friends and family.
2. I hate all the stuff they try to sell as you checkout. I’ve been a customer for years and have never bought any of their add-ons, but they still feel the need to make me wade through 57 add-on sales pages before I can check out. I understand this makes them money, but an option to never view the stuff I know I’ll never buy would be nice.
3. I hate being nagged about expiring domains for 6 months. Several months prior to the expiration of a domain, I start getting letters and emails letting me know. I appreciate that. What I don’t appreciate is getting them over and over and over again, even several weeks after I’ve intentionally let the domain expire. For many people this isn’t going to be an issue, but when you have 45+ domains, it gets really annoying.
4. I hate having to hunt down coupon codes. Every time I need to renew a domain or register a new one, I’ve got to hunt down the latest GoDaddy coupon code. By moving to Resell.biz, I get my .com’s for $7.73 without having to use a coupon. Again, not that big of an issue if you only have a domain or two, but really annoying when you have dozens.
5. I hate being censored. One day I got a phone call from GoDaddy letting me know that they were deleting my domain because they didn’t agree with its content. The domain’s content was completely legal and didn’t violate the GoDaddy acceptable use policy in any way, but they didn’t care. Luckily I was able to transfer the domain away before it was deleted, but if I happened to have missed their phone call then my domain would have been deleted and I would have lost (literally) tens of thousands of dollars per year.

My current domain registrar recommendations are (starting with my favorite):

1. Resell.biz
2. Namecheap
3. EuroDNS (for those oddball ccTLDs)

The company I host my sites with, The Planet, was recently purchased by another company. Although they say they are going to continue to provide the same level of service, a few chats with their customer service reps made it pretty clear that I was now considered a low-priority customer.

I’ve been needing to upgrade my server anyway, so I decided this was a great time to see what the new company, SoftLayer, had to offer. They have quite a few perks compared to my old host, such as IPv6 support and easy access to reverse DNS records, so I decided to switch. And I made out like a bandit.

With a coupon code and a lot of luck, I managed to get a $479/month + $49.00 setup fee server for only $309/month + $0.00 setup fee. Woot! Savings of over $2000 per year!

The new server has 4GB of RAM, 2 x 250GB hard drives in RAID 1, and dual quad core Xeon 5420 CPUs (2.5GHz with 2 x 12MB cache). This server is crazy fast. My old server could generate 50,000 fake names in about 7 minutes. The new server can generate 50,000 fake names in about 0.6 minutes.

To help my site go even faster, I’ve started using MaxCDN for static files (CSS, JS, images..) on the Fake Name Generator and am using Amazon 53 for the Fake Name Generator DNS. I’ve noticed huge performance gains from doing this and it costs almost nothing. You can get 1TB of data transfer from MaxCDN for about $30, which should last a long long time if you are only using it for static files.