I finished the switchover. In addition to moving VPS, I moved off of Resin and onto Tomcat. After dealing with some stuff in Tomcat, I wonder if Resin isn't better suited. Tomcat is really fussy/picky sometimes. More so on Windows than Linux. However, this whole ordeal was a great learning experience.

When I installed on CentOS, I just did a basic 'yum install tomcat5*' and it installed everything. This is where I ran into problems. Nothing was working correctly. I made a decision to get rid of it ('yum remove tomcat5*') and set it up manually myself.

The key thing to remember with tomcat, once you have it up and running is that you're going to want to make a environmental setting file called 'setenv.sh' - The {tomcat install dir}/bin/catalina.sh automatically looks for this file in the same directory.  This 'setenv.sh' file is responsible for telling tomcat where the JRE_HOME is located and other JVM memory options.

I have a couple of things to lock down, but I will be writing up a CentOS/Tomcat/Railo guide. Not that we need another one as they're pretty much the same instructions listed here along with the same resource links that I listed there as well. However, I threw one more thing into the mix. When I was at CFUnited, I managed to score a copy of Fusion Reactor. David Tattersall and crew was there next to the Railo booth and I watched / listened and pestered. I'm also going to get a twitter/plurk friend of mine get involved to get her thoughts on Fusion Reactor as well because I believe that a CF/Server Admin that can herd turkeys and servers for a living has to have some thoughts on Fusion Reactor.

I know, I know, I'm supposed to be busy switching VPS. I'm getting there. There's only so much I can do in a day. I just wanted to write a brief note about those interested in diving into jQuery. I'm probably exagerating percentages, but I want to say that 40% of jQuery development time is making sure your HTML / CSS is written correctly and as organized as you can possibly be with it.

If you spend at least that much, then you shouldn't run into any browser compatibility issues. 30% of your time is spent actually writing jQuery and 30% of your time is eyeballing the result in Firebug's console and fixing all the typos you made.

Remembering what the CSS rules are will be important. Id should be unique per page. So, if you have <a href="#" id="stuff">Text</a> - id="stuff" should not be found anywhere else. Even on a divs, paragraphs, etc. For those of us using a dynamic language (ColdFusion, PHP, etc), it can trip you up sometimes because you don't necessary think about the entire page when you're coding because you're within your application / module. I might even suggest that you come up with a naming scheme for whatever section you are in, such as id="footer_(whatever)" or id="app_row_(id)" or something to help you remember that this small chunk of code that you're looking at isn't necessarily the entire view that the end user is seeing. Classes can be used multiple times on a page. So, <a href="#" id="stuff" class="more">More Text</a> - class="more" can be used as many times as you want, even on other HTML elements.

In majority of the browsers, you can probably get away with multiple ids of the same name. In (at least) one of the browsers, it refuses to work (IE8). So, save yourself the headache. Stop rushing to get it out there and discipline yourself to writing valid (X)HTML / CSS code. jQuery will reward you for it and you'll have a long happy relationship.

Just a warning, within the next week or so, I'm going to be moving to a new VPS host. Slicehost has been an awesome provider and I highly recommend them to anyone that needs stability and absolute control over up/down sizing and creating new VPS instances on the fly. Their prices leave something to be desired.

I'm going to be relocating to Viviotech because I want to put my money with a company that support the CFML Community. I've been grilling the Viviotech guys since CFUnited and gauging their service. I recently gave them a full pro/con list that compared their service with Slicehost. The end result is that Slicehost wins on the automation front. Viviotech wins on price comparison ( 1 gig of ram and unmetered bandwidth for $50 bucks? (Ultra Package) Sold! ).

Switching VPS will finally give me a chance to do the following:

• Relocate Railo off of Resin and onto Tomcat which will finally sync with how I have my development server setup at home.
• Move off of the web-rat.com domain. It's frustrating, but my domain is getting blocked for "porn" and it's just silly. There's no porn here and none of the firewall companies will tell me what to do to fix this issue. So, moving to a new domain will finally break that vicious cycle. I'll be keeping web-rat.com for sentimental / other reasons.

The new domain is being setup when I have time to plunk away at it.  Currently I'm setting up the box and updating it, setting up all the essentials and locking it down. When the time is right, I'll switch RSS feeds over and start setting up redirects.