WebStyle

Helpful tips, latest gadgets and News



You are here: Home / Archives for Technology / Data Storage

The CD is 25 years old

by

Did you realize that the CD turned 25 on August 17th?

I didn’t realize that they’d been around that long, but then again it also feels like they’ve been around forever.

I remember when they first came out. It seemed like an alien idea and I’m sure that many people thought they wouldn’t last. Well they did. I just wonder if they’ll continue to be around now that iPods and other forms of portable multimedia players have become so popular.

The CD gave us higher quality sound. CD’s are smaller than records so they took up less space in our homes.

All we had to do was figure out what to do with our record players. Do you still have a record player? I do.




The New DocuPen Pen Scanner

by

standarddocupen.jpg

Pen scanners have been around for a while, but there’s a new one on the market that’s a true technological advancement.

Planon’s latest pen scanner is called the DocuPen. It’s both a scanner and high tech pen at once. It’s battery operated for full portability and it can store up to 100 pages in it’s memory scanning each in four to eight seconds.

Many of the previous pen scanners were slower and did not have the ability to scan graphics. The DocuPen does it all.

The current price of this high tech gadget is $270. The DocuPen has a USB interface, scans at a max of 200 x 200, weighs 2 oz, has an 8 MB flash memory, and works with Windows 98, ME, 2000 and XP.

docupen-rc800.jpg

All you need to do is place the DocuPen on a piece of paper parallel to the text and move the pen downward over the page. When you want to see what you’ve scanned just connect the pen scanner to a computer using the USB interface.

I could see sales people and those who are frequently out of the office at meetings finding this new DocuPen quite handy.

Web hosting problems – CPU resource over use – help!

by

If anyone has any ideas as to how to reduce my various sites CPU resource usage on my web hosting server I’m all ears.

Yes, if you’ve been reading a number of blogs in a row you might have seen that I’ve posted about my problems on a few blogs – don’t get confused … it’s all me. I just need help and I’m looking for suggestions!

I’ve just spent the last few days updating all of our blogs software and plugins. Turning off unnecessary plugins or ones that I thought were using resources that I didn’t need them too.

I did add one plugin to all our sites though and it was WP-Cache. I’ve had a few people ask me if I’m using that yet and yes, I’ve been using it now for a few days.

Trouble is my web host still says my sites are over using the CPU resources.

Here’s whats going on in my hosting account. Maybe someone can see a way I can reduce CPU usage?

I’ve got a shared hosting plan on Lunar Pages. The plan is very similar to what one would get with BlueHost. There are 17 websites on my account – 10 domains, 17 sites.

On my main domain Feverishthoughts.com I’ve got 7 wordpress blogs running. I bought 6 new domains to move some of those blogs to and I’ve been working on those sites but as of right now they take up little space and likely use very little of the CPU resources. However my plan is to move the sites over when the new domains gain a bit of PR … then I’ll be back to 11 or 12 websites.

Two domains have websites on them. One is a very large and fairly busy HTML based website. Since it’s HTML based I don’t think it’s causing the problem. This domain also has a subdomain running a blog on it.

The other website is running on Joomla. I had an old version of Joomla running the site until two days ago. Now that application has been updated to the latest version and I’ve removed some components and modules that might have been causing problems.

I’m actually hoping that it was the Joomla site that was causing the trouble – and hoping that by upgrading the site and getting ride of a few faulty components that I’ve solved the problem. I’ll probably find out later today when I hear from my web host about my CPU resource usage over the last day or so. Oh caching is activated on the Joomla site as well and has always been so if it’s working properly it should help.

So again … all the blogging software has been updated. Plugins such as google sitemap have been updated, and the Joomla CMS has been updated. Plus I’m using WP-cache on the WordPress blogs.

I can’t think of anything else that I can try to do to lessen CPU usage.

The sites are fairly busy but not that busy! How many page views and unique visitors a month does it take to make you move to a Virtual private server or a dedicated server?

Out of the 11 active sites only 3 are extremely busy. The rest get traffic but only 100 to 150 visitors a day at the most.

In total – all the sites – active and not yet very active domains got a total of 255,641 visitors and 722,038 page views last month. I’m sure the sites will be up to a million page views per month by August or so, especially when the new domains get a bit more active.

I’m not saying that 3/4 of a million page views a month is a small amount but really … is that enough to have to move off shared hosting?

Any ideas? I’ve got to resolve this problem ASAP as it’s driving me nuts and keeping me from doing real work on my sites.

Meta

Pages

Archives