Summersault Blog

When you redevelop a website’s content structure (which often happens when you redevelop it’s graphical appearance), it’s pretty common for directories and files to get renamed, chunks of content to get moved around, and in general, for the site to become quickly unfamiliar to those who had learned their way around it.

If your site is fairly small, this isn’t a big problem – someone can just start from the beginning and get where they’re going fairly easily. But if your site has lots of content, it can be very jarring to have to go find all of that content again. What’s even more noteworthy is that if there are lots of people linking to your site or if you’ve achieved a certain standing in search engine results, rearranging all of your content structure can have a negative impact on how people find and use your site.

So, here are six tips for any time when you make significant changes to the content structure of a non-trivially sized website:
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When we started in 1997 and then opened our first real office in 1998, the first phone Summersault ever owned was a small, gray two-line office model with, I believe, five separate voice-mailboxes. It cost us around $200, after we spent a long time researching and discussing just the right one to get. It sat quietly on my desk, and when the occasional call did come in (it could even do a conference call!), everything worked just fine – we never had to open it up, reprogram it, reboot it, back it up, or monitor it. It’s not hard to long for those days, as Summersault’s growth has meant some costly and time consuming expansion in our phone infrastructure over the years. But our recent experience installing and configuring the Asterisk open source PBX phone system has given me some hope that we’re returning to an era where the phone is once again a useful tool that saves people time and makes communication more efficient, instead of less so. This article touts some of the benefits of this kind of phone system, and has some notes and tips on how it might help your business or organization – large or small – have enterprise-level phone system features on the cheap.
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Now that the dust has settled on Indiana’s switch to Daylight Savings Time on April 2nd, 2006. here are some notes on what worked for us at Summersault.

As a web hosting and development provider, we have been located in Richmond, Indiana since 1997. We have never had to update our time zone configuration or even change our clocks until now.

Although there already some good resources about coping with the change, my search turned up a number of additional resources I thought would be useful to share.

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I was recently tasked with finding out how much each disk space each of our PostgreSQL and MySQL databases was taking up.

The job was considerably easier for PostgreSQL, which ships with tools in contrib/dbsize to do just this. After following the simple instructions there, all that was necessary for easy reporting was to create a simple view. Here’s the one I used:
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It’s a pretty common problem: you have an image on your website that’s attractive or useful to someone else – a logo, a photo, a cool piece of art. They build a web page hosted somewhere out there that makes a reference to your image. Now every time a user visits that person’s site, the user’s web browser loads up the image from your site, using up your bandwidth and, in many cases, displaying it for purposes you hadn’t really intended – sometimes called “hotlinking”. The other day I found someone who was using a 6MB image from my personal site as a background image for theirs – and they were apparently pretty popular, so it created a lot of large requests on our webserver. Recently one of our hosting clients and longtime friend of Summersault, Justin Simoni, was having this happen so much that he was regularly exceeding his bandwidth quota and incurring all sorts of hassle. So, we tackled the problem head-on, and even though there are lots of references around the net on how to limit this problem, none quite seemed to document the particular method we used. I’ll do that here in case anyone else finds it useful.
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At this very moment, hundreds of people around the country seem to be flocking to the Summersault-hosted website belonging to Dancing Rabbit, an ecovillage located in Missouri. Why? Their intentional community was featured in tonight’s episode of the FX show “30 Days“, hosted by Morgan Spurlock (of “Supersize Me” fame). We at Summersault have had professional and personal ties to Dancing Rabbit since 1999, and we’re happy to be hosting their site (even with the onslaught of traffic!), especially given our own mission of working to build and sustain communities. We hope the national spotlight is favorable to them, and is an educational opportunity for those wanting to learn more about community building and living off the grid.

A few years ago when I was working remotely on a regular basis, I looked seriously into creating a Virtual Private Network (VPN) setup for our office network. A VPN is a handy thing: it lets your desktop computer(s) at the remote location (e.g. home office, client office, etc.) appear to be on the local network at the main office, which means network services like printing, file sharing, e-mail, etc. can all happen seamlessly without special “remote access” privileges, firewall modifications, and so on. Many organizations with telecommuting staff use VPNs these days to reduce the overhead and hassle of having remote systems that need to interoperate with the rest of the organization. This post talks about how, after a frustrating experience last time around, I easily got a VPN up and running this time.
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The Sober.P worm, which spreads itself through infected e-mail attachments, seems to be hitting the U.S. fairly hard this week. I just noticed that it started coming into Summersault’s mail servers en masse – at least compared to our normal virus load – earlier this week.
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The “Domain Name System” (DNS) is essentially the phone book of the Internet. It’s what translates human readable domain names like “summersault.com” into computer-friendly numeric addresses that identify where a particular website, e-mail account, or other service related to that domain actually lives. Like most of the rest of the Internet’s technologies and supporting systems, the DNS system was not designed for level or type of usage it currently experiences. Over time and through some poor policy decision making, the DNS infrastructure has become, in the context of what constitutes a reasonable quality of operations given modern expectations about network technologies, essentially broken. In recent years, as commercialization of the Internet continues and more and more services become available, DNS has become broken in new and painful ways that have a daily impact on our operations as a hosting company. Even if you’re a casual user, the dysfunction probably affects your own use of the Internet more than you know.
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A Realtime Blackhole List (RBL) is a list of computers on the Internet that made it onto the list because they were caught spamming, sending out viruses, or some other unsavory activity that met the list maintainer’s standard for being listed. Mail service providers all over the Internet then use these lists to decide whether to accept or reject mail from those listed computers (or, in many cases, just “tag” mail from those computers as suspect). As Summersault has continued to rely more heavily on RBLs for keeping out unwanted junkmail and viruses, we’ve also increasingly found the need for being able to maintain exceptions to those lists. This post talks about how to setup your own RBL system for listing those exceptions.
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