The internet is vast with resources. With the assistance of Google, Bing or any other search engine, you can quickly find solutions to even the weirdest problems. One of the invaluable tools I've come across is Twitter. Invaluable because it allows me to keep in touch with my CFML peers. Pittsburgh isn't exactly known for being a hotbed of ColdFusion developers (there are some of us here, but the exact numbers are unknown).

Now, you may be thinking, bah, twitter is a waste of time. Just a bunch of noise. Perhaps. Perhaps it's not. I present the following as evidence that it's not.

• CFML search on twitter
• Railo search on twitter
• OpenBD search on twitter
• ColdFusion search on twitter

Non CFML related goodness:

• jQuery search on twitter
• MySQL search on twitter

Scan through those links and you'll find a couple of things:

• Relevant News
• People talking about problems
• People talking about solutions
• And, of course, there's always going to be junk spewed forth by bots, spammers, etc.

Also, Twitter recently came out with the concept of "lists" so you can tag people and put them in a list. I have a lot of CFML developers tagged in a list. Everyone on the Railo team is tagged as well (or, if you want it broken down further Railo Technologies and Volunteers). So, Twitter is good. Twitter can also bad at times. You sometimes have to weed out the junk to get to the good, but in my experience, people tend to be focused and respectful. Sometimes you'll get a big political / religious / opinionated debate between Twitter friends, but I either ignore it or watch from the side lines. If anything, you get to know your community a little better than you anticipated.

As a community manager for Railo, I tend to look out for new people talking about Railo and offer assistance. The one time I did assist someone, I got told via email later that I just proved to his boss that Twitter is a good thing because I was able to provide real time help just from a vague question on Twitter. I consider that a major win for the community.

So, before you block Twitter or dismiss it as useless garbage. Try it out for yourself. Go ahead and follow some lists from above and more importantly get involved and talk to people. The more we communicate about issues the faster we can get suggestions and resolutions.

Tweet tweet.

Feel free to dismiss this blog post, after all, it's nothing more than another negative opinion about Apple, iTunes and more.

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Ages ago, I used to host my own server. I was running everything off an fast ASDL account with Speakeasy.net. I had a small box sitting down in my basement that I rarely touched and it just chugged along with very little maintenance needed. I had a battery backup on it to survive the ocassional powerflicker and beyond that, everything just worked with very little downtime.

The issue I ran into was spam related. Spammers were able to take down my box (via mail and/or blog commenting). I got comment spammed once so bad that it basically trashed the harddrive into a click of death. That was the first time my domain went down. Never did figure out what happened the second time and by then, I had enough. I just had a box online and web-rat.com was for the most part, just sitting there idle.

About a year ago, Verizon FiOS (Fiber Optic) was finally available in Pittsburgh and I was hesitant to switch since I had a solid (yet, expensive) experience with Speakeasy. Switching to FiOS meant putting my website back out onto some random shared server and I was just cringing at the thought. I went looking for VPS instead. In order to feel like I had more control over my VPS, I made some changes in my setup. I refused to install a mail server and I wanted DNS external to my VPS so that I could be free to move to whatever service I wanted as quickly as I wanted.

Mail server wise, I switched to Google Apps. I'm a big fan of gmail anyway and doing this has just made my life easier. It also allowed me to reclaim an email account that I had long since abandoned since the account was just drowning in spam. There's still a difference between a gmail account and a google app account for some reason, but they're minor and not worth complaining about. DNS server wise, I switched to DNSMadeEasy.com. The VPS was initially at Slicehost and the recent switch from Slicehost to Viviotech was a money / value situation. I was getting more value for my buck at Viviotech and I've been really happy with the service / uptime. Doing all added bills, but the bottom line was still cheaper than what I was doing when I was on Speakeasy's service and I upgraded my internet at home which is silly fast.

That being said, there have been times I've been considering switching to a commercial FiOS account which would give me 5 IPs again and being able to host at home again. I would no longer be limited hardware wise and bandwidth would be crazy on a 35 Mps / 35 Mps Fiber. Not really so concerned about getting spammed again since all my spammy services are someone elses problems. I would still have an issue with http service, but the Verizon FiOS router has a built-in throttling controls. I can set the max incoming for a particular port and slow down the service so it doesn't go overboard.

VPS is a nice inexpensive solution, but it still doesn't hold a candle to a dedicated server unless you're willing to throw money at it. Keep in mind, I'm not even thinking of Amazon or Rackspace Cloud services.