Day: August 15, 2005

Best Web hosting service/software for a family Web site

by philg

The server for www.greenspun.com is just about dead.  Fortunately this comes at a time when one of my nephews, last name of “Greenspun”, is reaching his 11th birthday.  I’m planning on shutting down the outsourced online community component of greenspun.com, which is these days better handled by Yahoo! Groups, and replacing the whole server with a family Web site.  The question then becomes where to get it hosted and what software to run.  I want the 11-year-old punk to administer the service; I will keep my own content primarily on http://philip.greenspun.com


It would be nice to have the following:



  • email for the family, e.g., python-the-cichlid@greenspun.com to forward wherever
  • places for family members to create personal Web sites, in the pre-Weblog days I would have said that these would be subdirectories off the root
  • RSS feeds to which interested friends can subscribe; it would be nice if someone could say “I want to see new stuff by Benjamin and Harry but not from Philip” or “I want to see everything new”
  • easy to upload and update content in various formats (text, photos, sound, video) by young family members using Web browsers alone
  • long-run potential for doing some scripting and database programming (though this will not be an online community-style site; the Internet is too full of spam these days to make that worthwhile at a family level)
  • if there is scripting it should be done in some tools that are likely to be popular in 2015 or 2020 when we are likely next to examine the server
  • an annual cost of under $250 (Uncle Philip needs to save up for his turbine-powered helicopter)

Where to host this and what software to run?

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Best way to play podcasts in a car?

by philg

I would like to listen in my car to some of Doug Kaye’s IT Conversations and perhaps other podcasts and audio streams from the Internet.  The car has a Pioneer stereo with a fantastically horrific user interface (all faceplate and bouncing lights display; a handful of tiny buttons; the factory Toyota system was much better but it is no longer being made and the 1998 original is dead) but thankfully an AUX input and the ability to play MP3-encoded CDs.


What is the best way to get podcast items into the car?  An MP3 jukebox of some sort?  Burning CDs every now and then?  If an MP3 jukebox is the right way to go, which one makes the most sense given that a big part of it will get wiped and refreshed every week or so?


[Please don’t suggest an iPod.  I have used friend’s iPods and find the user interface to be confusing compared to the Creative MP3 jukeboxes (they have more buttons).  Additionally, various commenters on http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2005/07/16 thought that I might be gay and therefore it seems unwise to appear in public with anything made by Apple.]


[Resolution:  I bought a 1 GB miniSD card for my Motorola MPx220 mobile phone and I burned an MP3 CD that does in fact play in the car.  I still can’t figure out MP3 music CDs.  Is there a standard format for a playlist that you also burn onto it?  If not, how does the average player figure out in what order to play the tracks?]

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