When I came up with the idea of Wikipes to provide an easy way for anyone to submit recipes using the wiki-concept, I didn’t know what wiki software to use. I tried out numerous ones, from the famous Mediawiki one that Wikipedia uses, to PhpWiki, and numerous others.

Most were very difficult to customize and style up, others were confusing to use, some I couldn’t even figure out how to install. After a week of trying out wiki softwares, I settled on DokuWiki, which was standards-compliant, easy to cusotmize, and I could modify it to suit the needs of a recipe site.

Barely 6 months after the unveiling of Wikipes, the site gets between 3,000 to 5,000 visitors a day. Unfortunately, a recipe is only posted once or twice every 3 days. I’m not sure why; is it because people are not used to the wiki concept, are intimidated by the open approach, or are too lazy to type up a recipe using a template?

To add to my frustrations, Dreamhost decided to mess with the Zend Optimizer, and this caused problems with Dokuwiki and Wikipes was down for a whole weekend, when traffic is the biggest. I sent in a support ticket to them and they got back to me 3 days later, talked with the Dokuwiki guy about the problem, saying it’s a bug in their software, and I was sent this letter from Dreamhost support:

So I’ve started a conversation with the DocuWiki guy, but no easy answers thusfar. The strangest thing is that out of all of the PHP sites we host (and we host a ton…probably about 90,000 of our 130,000 domains use PHP) it’s just you and the one other DocuWiki user that have had any problems.

Since so many of our customers are dying to use the Optimizer the best suggestions I’ve got are to either compile a PHP binary of your own that won’t use the Optimizer or to switch to a different wiki (we offer a one-click install of mediawiki, which powers the Wikipedia and is pretty great).

Once you get a PHP binary somewhere in your homedir you can use this guide to have all .php scripts on your site run via it

They’ve given me an ultimatum, either use another wiki software, or have a broken site, since I don’t know how to compile my own PHP binary. I’ve spent countless hours modifying Wikipes, working with Erik from http://kartooner.com to flesh out the site, and getting the word out.

I knew Wikipes, being a new thing, would face an uphill battle, but I didn’t expect to have problems that are beyond my control. I’ve always been able to figure things out, but this is the first time that I’ve used a software where the alternatives aren’t that great.

So, my question is this, should I continue on, and try to find another wiki, or cut my losses and move on. I feel like I’ve hit a brick wall with no footholds to climb over.

Don’t get me wrong, I love designing websites, but providing the service to random strangers is what I hate. While talking to Erik (kartooner.com) about why we do what we do, and building standards-compliant designs, I realized a few things about my attitude about designing websites for pay.

I killed Designtopia, my site offering my web design skills as a service, because I got sick of people telling me to use marquee or blink text which are a usability nightmare for any website design, or to do anything outside what I know is the right thing to do with designs. I got sick of people emailing me and telling me to use a bright green font on a white background, which as you probably know, is very, very difficult to read.

I’m very picky, and I don’t want to make non-standards compliant or unusable website just because they pay me to. My goal is to make the web a friendlier place, not continue to facilitate 1995-like conventions that hurts the web, more than anything else.

Too many people think that because they paid you to do a design, gives them the right to email you everyday and make you do small changes on the site that you don’t like, that’s not what I do as a web designer.

You don’t tell a plumber who comes in how to fix a toilet, and you don’t tell a cabinet maker how to do his job either, so why do these people feel they can tell you what to do with their site? They don’t know better, they don’t know about usability, typography, whitespace, etc. As web designers, we’re trained in what works for a website the best, what will produce the best results, and what will help companies the most for their business. We employ tricks and semantically-correct conventions to ensure search engines like Google understands the content and gives a thumbs-up, thereby giving the site a better ranking and more exposure.

This is why I hate designing websites for random people. I’m lucky in that the past couple of projects I’ve worked on with Erik were with people that understood our talents and let us do what we do best. That’s why I figure as long as I stay amongst people who love standards-compliant designs, and work with people that want us to do our best, I’ll love designing websites.

The worst feeling for any website developer/designer/whatever is to be working on the site, and then it suddenly goes down. Now you’re sitting there, stuck, not able to do anything but wait for the site come up. Imagine that it is late in the night, in fact it’s very early in the morning, and you need to get some sleep. When you wake up, will you remember where you left off, what will be broken, will people see a site that won’t work and never come back?

That’s what happened last night, so here I am, up early to make sure Wikipes is okay and finish what I was doing - updating the site with better code. However, the site isn’t up, and I got an email from my host that said this:

Unfortunately, I’ve had to disable your domain’s web services. It was causing the web server it’s on to crash. Unfortunately, we cannot provide a quality product to the rest of our users when this happens. I’ll re-enable the domain in a few hours and see if that helps.

No explanation as to what caused the crash (too much traffic, maybe?) It has been beyond a few hours, it’s been over 4 hours now. Suffice to say, I’m not a happy camper right now.

Update: Got a response from the host, which clarifies the situation a bit:

I’m reenabling your domain name. I’m not sure what it was, but your site would spawn and open several hundred apache instances, until apache reached it’s child process limit of 256. Once that happens, no new websites can be served. That then kills the server. I also noticed that several php scripts you were running were using a fair amount of CPU. That usually means the code you’re using isn’t as efficient as it could be. Unfortunately, we can’t really help with that at all.

Why does my roommate always ask me to cook dinner when I’m too tired to cook? Is it female intuition to get you to feel annoyed? She wants me to make meatloaf. I hate meatloaf, don’t know how to make it, and to add insult to injury, she doesn’t eat beef so I have to use ground turkey. Turkeyloaf, anyone?

If you haven’t yet, read about my Sony (mis)adventures with their so-called customer support when my 27″ Sony WEGA TV decides to hardly work for me. Sony finally got me a new TV to replace the old flaky one, which died again 3 days ago, and wouldn’t turn back on. It took them months to finally send me a replacement.

Two guys delivered the TV in an uncovered truck, and when I was signing the papers, I asked them what took them so long to get the TV to me, because they called me last Wednesday and told me that I’d have it by Friday, and a whole week later, on a Saturday, they deliver it to me.

They said that one of them had to go to South Florida to make a delivery, and another said his truck was broken down and he had no way of getting it to me. This is the uncovered truck, mind you. How do you have a delivery/repair business if you use an uncovered pickup truck is beyond me. Further proof that I live in Redneckville.

Suffice to say, I don’t intend on ever buying a Sony product. Not with this kind of “support”. I use that term in the most loose term.

The Florida State Trooper group called me tonight, at 8 p.m., I might add, asking for donations. I politely told the guy that we can barely afford food and paying the rent, no thanks in large part to the damages done by the hurricanes. The guy was persistent though, saying that instead of the usual $35 donation, there are minimal packages that I can donate to, because there are officers that are getting killed in the line of duty and they are doing a crucial job to protect society.

I can fully understand the monumental task police officers and troopers go through each day, and if I had money, I would gladly donate, but I don’t. The guy kept badgering me though. He had a distinct Texan accent, and since I can mimic one very good, I decided to switch to my Authentic Texan Accent and said, “Now sir, if yer can guarantee that you won’t be pullin’ me over an’ look the other way when I’m breaking the law, I’ll gladly donate ten dollers to yer dern charity thing.”

He apologized for wasting my time and hung up. Next year, if I have money, I’ll make it a priority to donate. For now, I need to make it a priority to keep my refridgerator as less bare as possible. I got me dern shotgun by me trusty trigger finger in case any dern hooligan decide to be ransackin’ around here.

Have you ever talked to someone, and they have that canned interest voice?

“So they donated thousands of dollars to the …”
“Uh huh … wow, that’s great! Yea … uh huh … really? That is really cool …”

Why don’t you just tell me you’re not interested, or you’re too busy instead of feigning interest and wasting my time?

My dad does this all the time, and I do mean all the time. He’s always busy, and when he’s not, he’ll try to be busy. He called and as I was explaining something to him, he did that to me. 5 minutes later after I finished talking to him, I tried to share some good news to my roommate, and she did the exact same thing. What am I, a robot? I wish people would stop wasting my time.