Personal Blog of Ricky Mills; Web Developer, PHP Programmer and Mobile Application Developer
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Poor little Mini!

November 21st, 2008 | Posted by Rick in Apple | Hardware | Random | Servers | Uncategorized - (0 Comments)

I’ve been using a MacMini as my home server for about 6 months now. I found one cheap (£250) on ebay. Its only an Intel core duo (not core 2) running at 1.66 but it works great as a server. I had problems with it when I bought it. It wouldn’t boot and showed all the signs of a faulty RAM module.

The seller kindly sent me a replacement 1GB stick as it looked like one of the RAM slots was faulty. I had been running fine for about 5 months, then last month I did a re-boot after OS X 10.5.5 was released and boom….the mini wouldn’t boot. After spending about 5 days trying to fix it, even trying to reinstall OS X I gave in. It looked like OS X stopped running if there were memory issues.

I installed Ubuntu which worked flawlessly….for 5 days. I’m still running Ubuntu and have to re-boot every 5 or so days as it locks up. Nothing in the logs, it just locks up. I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s something not right hardware wise and cant be fixed.

I’m going to be looking into replacing it, but cant really afford to splash out on another MacMini. I think I’ll be making a new server using an Intel Atom package. I can still run at 1.6 Ghz and its still a small sized motherboard.

Since the Atom integrated motherboards are fairly cheap, I will be able to spend some money on getting system to boot on a solid state drive. I found that you can get 32GB CF Cards, and a CF to SATA drive for under £50 which is great! You can even get duel CF readers, thus giving you a 64GB solid state drive on the cheap!

So heres my spec plan:

1.6Ghz Intel Atom
2GB DDR2 RAM
2x 32GB CF solid drives (using a SATA -> CF adaptor)
A small case (not much bigger than the MacMini case hopefully)
DVD RW +/-

Since I’m off on holiday soon I cant really afford to build this, however when I’m over in the states, I’ll pop into circuit city, Best Buy and a few other places to see if I can get some of the parts….will be much cheaper than buying here! :D

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A look back at: January 08

February 6th, 2008 | Posted by Rick in Project Updates | RikeMedia | Uncategorized - (0 Comments)

Ok, so January, the first month of my new site. Every month I plan to have a post summarizing what I did during the previous month towards my goals. so, lets take a look back at January shall we!

RickyMills.com (Re)-Launched
I relaunched RickyMills.com and ditched my old self-made portfolio site in favor of a nice WordPress blog, which would be used to track my progress towards being in control (either through sole ownership or through myself and Mike‘s Rike Media brand) of websites that would generate a long term income.

The blog got off to a great start, however I don’t feel I made enough effort in my first month. This was mainly down to having a lot of coursework to do (and catch up on) as I received 5 conditional University offers.

FotoRazor.com

After looking around at some websites for sale, I purchased FotoRazor.com, a free image host. The site was earning $70 income from text link sales and pop up adverts. I managed to increase this income to over $100 a month by adding optimized adsense adverts on the site.

I found that after this, I really didn’t want to run this kind of site. It had the multiple revenue sources that I was looking for, however I don’t really want to run an image host. Because of this, I placed it up for sale again. I’ve currently had many offers for the site, all of which I am considering. I did have one $700 offer however it turned out to be from a fake bidder. You can bid on the site over at DigitalPoint or DNForum.

WebmasterStash.com

Not much has changed around the site. Mike released some updates for StashNews, which is really turning into a great news systems. I dont think there is a better flat-file news system out there, feature wise. Its got everything that you would expect, plus that little bit more. For example; Integrated template engine with web-based editor (very few flat-file template engines can boast this!), easy and fast site integration, multiple users, captcha image verification on the news comment forms to help battle the spam bots, and more.

In addition to this, I started work on a concept for a new area to WebmasterStash; webmaster tools. Basically the idea is to have custom tools that allow users to check pagerank, backlinks, generate meta tags, etc. I’m still working on this, however I hope to have it live with our first bunch of tools online towards the end of February.

I’m hoping that once FotoRazor has sold that we can get a vbSEO license and/or some decent Photoshop tutorials written as mine aren’t exactly the best! Also I want to get the site promoted more, however I really dont think sticking some banners on a few sites is going to do much to help. We need some quality content. The templates and scripts are good, but the site needs tutorials to survive.

Other bits and bobs

I moved all our sites (except our old WSDeluxe project) over to a single VPS server as our hosting costs were about $60 a month. It was the right time to do it as our Dreamhost account is due for renewal in Feburary and after their “minor” billing problems I dont fancy staying with them (even more so when I saw that our 2007 uptime was only 85%). I moved off our JaguarPC managed VPS as we dont need a managed VPS so I was paying for a service that I didnt need.

The new VPS is a Link 4 at VPSLink.com – We’ve used them before and they have a good reliable service. The only downside is they have hard-drive speed issues which make sites seem a little more sluggish, however this isn’t really a huge problem for us at this stage.

So, thats January! I’ll be posting more progress soon, including the status of the FotoRazor auction!

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