The Edge [of all] Journeys

You’ll have to bear with me – all of you who are interested in our story for the human aspect – I must descend into Geekdom Venting Land for a post here.

I’m a story teller, so if you just want to know how to fix shopping carts or other PHP web applications hosted by Fat Cow, skip down a few paragraphs.

Renee and I design and code websites together and between the two of us we’ve worked on everything from massive enterprise SharePoint driven collaborative web environments to mom-and-pop hand crafted simple sites and everything CMS or static in between. We’ve built and hacked and skinned and themed Drupal and WordPress and even peeked at Joomla, and we’ve done it across quite a range of hosting providers over the years:

• Go Daddy (our personal favorite for a while now – a little too clicky but the best admin tools and excellent support)
• Fat Cow (a pretty amazing deal with their unlimited plan)
• 1 and 1 (so so… wouldn’t recommend necessarily, but tolerable)
• iPowerWeb (sometimes a necessary evil)
• HostPrince (I do NOT recommend them at all, but my experience with them is a couple years old now)
• etc.

Implementing similar solutions across a variety of hosting platforms, I probably shouldn’t be surprised, but I am still caught somewhat off guard by the variety out there in default configurations and compliance (or lack thereof) with best practices that sometimes get taken for granted.

Case in point: Fat Cow’s default php.ini file is simply atrocious. I love their unlimited plan, and in my short experience with them so far their service is solid. But it’s like they installed PHP on the shared servers a few years ago and never touched the php.ini config. Ever.

Why is this a problem? Well, if you want to run anything like WordPress you’re going to need more than teh default memory_limit = 18M from like 1980 (ok, not really but you get the point). Go Daddy defaults theirs to 32M I think … or maybe it’s 64M now… And if you want to run anything like a shopping cart that requires php sessions – forget it (unless you start by uncommenting the session.save_path line and setting it to something useful – even though the session.save_handler = files … unreal! by default it tells php to use the filesystem to save sessions but doesn’t give it anywhere to put session files.).

This all finally came to head when I was trying to get eShop working in WordPress for http://ordercu.com

I knew eShop was probably NOT the culprit because we set it up and have it working great on http://foodbeautiful.com (hosted by Go Daddy).

What is funny (not) is that 2 months ago I had beaten my head against 3-4 different cart systems in WordPress for  http://indiefilmvideo.com (also hosted on Fat Cow) and never got to the bottom of why they wouldn’t work quite right. Well, now I know.

SO – the moral of the post is, here are the first tweaks you might want to make to your php.ini file if your host is Fat Cow. (If you don’t know where to find the php.ini file or how to modify it, you probably shouldn’t anyway). These are the changes I have made so far. In each case, just update the values being set.

• memory_limit  = 64M
• [uncomment – delete “;” – and set session.save_path to something like]:
• session.save_path = “/home/users/web/b2634/moo.ACCOUNTNAME/cgi-bin/tmp”
  (make sure you pull YOUR actual home path from the front page of the Fat Cow control panel)
  (without this change php sessions will not work and you will get bizarre behavior in shopping carts where the things you add to the cart disappear on checkout or subsequent visits to the cart)
• register_globals = Off
  (eeeek! can you believe that was still defaulted to On ???)

So, there you have it. Even with these basic tweaks WordPress will hum a LOT faster and you’ll actually be able to use shopping cart plugins for it. Imagine that.

You know, I had this whole thing planned – we were going to hit day 365 and I was going to write this extremely insightful and introspective post on what it means to have been at this for a year already… Well, the day came and went and we’ve been so busy that we didn’t even notice. Isn’t that typical? And doesn’t that say everything right there all by itself?

What a amazing week… well and a bit I guess. We had an amazing Passover and Feast of Unleavened Bread for the last week here in PA, met some incredible people, lots of fellowship, meals, sharing, learning together etc. Still managed to put in nearly 40 hours on projects even with 3 Sabbaths in there. Don’t know how I pulle d . adf firgh Zzzzzz….

wha … What? what was I saying? Oh right, anyway. This will all be more cursory than it should be because I am in the process of digging out of a 3-month photographic hole. I have 2 down and 1 to go and will share in a second. So back to updates: the kids are in wild country mode: scraping knees, swinging on rope swings, playing in the creek, cutting bare feet, flying down the hill on scooters, running around with friends, that sort of thing.

Other highlights: Reayah got to be be a flower girl in her first wedding experience, I just spent three hours with Bennah “organizing” his bed (a bio hazmat operation I can assure you)… actually that might not make much sense to you unless I also provide the additional detail that the kids keep all their personal things / toys / collections at the foot of their beds, Joy is both participating in and resisting potty training at the same time quite nicely, Zach and Jaiden are quite the buddies now and while Zach is convinced we are going to build a flying car together this summer – one that actually flies – Jaiden just wants to make sure that he is doing whatever his brothers are doing.

It’s raining gently outside… such a soothing thing… totally different experience than from inside a house. I got two new drain spouts attached to the rain channel today (I knocked them off a couple months ago when a branch reached out across an otherwise reasonable turn radius and scraped a few little holes in our rubber roof that we discovered a few weeks later during a massive downpour in the form of extra water we didn’t need in the kids room). I patched the holes up earlier in the week.

Today was laundry day. And grocery day. And pick up the new door latch from the RV dealer finally day.

I have to tell you about our main door latch. Ok. Proof positive that things are engineered to break – this was the most ridiculous design ever – back in Florida the tab that was responsible for making the entire handle and latch mechanism work broke clean off and we were stuck inside the trailer until I disassembled the whole thing. I tried everything to avoid having to buy another cheap replacement that would just cause another head ache later. I am not kidding – here are some of the random things I employed in various attempts to rig it (some of which lasted longer than others): aluminum from a beer can, JB weld (but it was too old to last) and a hex nut, a screw, a modified golf tee (still inside the spring to control handle travel distance), hockey tape by itself, and hockey tape with pop-sickle stick (which is actually working fairly well so far). But the moment of truth will come and I better get a proper replacement in there. It has been quite a thorn in my side.

Anyway, enough boring RV life drivel. Here are some pictures! Including some from the solar panel project that I added to the truck.

January 2010

February 2010

Solar Panel Project

It’s hard to believe that in two weeks we will have been at this for a year already. Amazing!

We are settling in here at our friend’s in Pennsylvania where we started out last year around this time after a wonderful but all too short 2-stop journey up from Georgia. We camped at the fantastic Newport News Park for a few days and missed our dear brother and sister and family who used to live just a few short miles from there.

We had a wonderful time with our dear friends Ben and Elizabeth – hanging out at the campground on Saturday and then at their place on Sunday. Joy really took to their little girl who is only 2 days older. Now, every little girl Joy sees is “Aa-bee, Aa-bee!”

I had a business meeting on Monday with the very talented and creative folks at Ethicom (who are also long time family friends), and afterwards I brought the whole family over to their office for what was supposed to be a short visit (not wanting to impose). Well, it turned into quite a much larger adventure than that and by the time we left a couple hours later the kids all had their own offices, Bennah was working for $10 a day, they had produced their own “magazines” with a little help from a copier, and they each had a new writing/sketch book and an umbrella. They were talking about their new offices the rest of the day.

Keith from Ethicom put it so well (and I hope he doesn’t mind being quoted here): “It was a pure delight to have your little family come and spend a few moments showing us what true creativity really is. We need to be reminded that the Lord teaches us about Himself through the lives of little children and to always look at life through their eyes.”

The delight was ours! And the reminder was so valuable to Renee and I as parents. We can easily get caught up in the duties of raising children and sometimes forget the simple delights. We often look at things with our adult perspective and only see the extra work that a child’s whims might entail. But if we return to our own child-like vision still buried down deep underneath all the grown-up responsibilities and “mature” perspectives we’ve collected over the years, we can quickly tap into an endless wellspring of simple joy. To all our dear parent friends out there: chase the whims of your children with them through their creative and carefree eyes and you will discover the delight of remembering that anything is possible!

From there we headed up to our old stompin’ grounds near DC. It was a lot of fun watching the kids’ reaction to the familiar sites. They were beside themselves with amazement. Bennah kept exclaiming: “I just traveled back in time!” It was surreal in a beautiful way.

On Wednesday I dropped in on my old buddies at the White House and had a wonderful time catching up a little with them and hitting my Chipotle for lunch. Yes, it is my Chipotle. I used to make the pilgrimage at least once a week while I worked there. So many things have changed and so many things haven’t changed. Several people asked me throughout the day: “So, do you miss it?” Do I miss working at the White House? I told them all the same thing – I loved working there, and I would love working there again, but I do not miss it; not one bit 🙂

Our youngest son Jaiden asks us almost every single day no matter where we are: “can we ride the metro train sometime?” Our universal answer is, “yes – sometime.” So, Thursday was finally sometime and we rode the metro into DC and invaded the National Museum of Natural History. The little ones tired out in pretty short order, but Bennah and I made an extended exploration while Renee took the others for snacks in the Fossil Cafe.

The Pohick Bay Campground in Virginia near our old home was so nice – we wanted to stay longer, but Friday came and it was time to leave. We had a very pleasant journey up to PA and are now enjoying the farm, the kids have their friends again whom they’ve been looking forward to seeing for months, and we are getting ready for Passover.

I’m still incredibly busy with business and have added even more new projects to the list. I much prefer drinking through a fire-hose I suppose. Episode #5 is now live! I need to catch up on 3 months of photos to my SmugMug galleries. Spring is coming and YHWH’s blessings abound!

Episode 10 of Journeys – Mar 2010: Back in Virginia and DC doing some of our favorite things (hanging out with best friends, riding the metro, hitting the museums).

Episode 9 of Journeys – Mar 2010: In this episode we explore the Georgia Guidestones and what they represent.

Episode 8 of Journeys – Feb 2010: In this episode we travel from the beaches of Key West, Florida up through Northern Georgia and catch lizards, shave beards, read stories, take baths, ride bikes and scooters, and more along the way.

So, let the movie parties begin! I have finally come out of the video editing, rendering, and uploading mire bruised and scarred but victorious. After no less than 3 attempts on each, uploads and deletes, codec woes, and other sundry technology battles – Episodes 1-3 of Journeys (the quasi-documentary) are LIVE!

The best way to watch them is on the new page I created just for this purpose. I’m playing with a very sweet new tool by Apture, and I think you will find the viewing experience quite fun! – Go to The Movie (up in the top menu) to watch all the Journeys episodes. I will also update that page as I add episodes in the future.

Or, you can also watch them on my YouTube channel.

I’ve also updated The Map with the last legs of our travels.

We are getting ready to leave Georgia in a few short days and work our way back up to Pennsylvania for spring. We’re hoping to swing through Hampton Roads (VA) and Washington, DC along the way and drop in on some friends in our old stompin’ grounds.