I am still here. I am still going to graduate school. I haven’t abandoned this Weblog. This semester I am doing the Government Documents class with Sheri Irvin. It is my tenth class out of thirteen required classes, and I expect to receive the MLIS in May 2006, assuming all goes as planned.

I liked the XML/XSLT class last fall, but I felt that though the teacher was excellent and kept us very busy with useful and challenging assignments, there is still so much more to learn about XML and XLST. At least we have a solid foundation, can read an XML or XSLT file, and can work from here on our own. This summer I hope to take the PHP class to get a firm grip on coding PHP and talking with the MySQL database at a code level. I will take two classes next fall. I am sorry that I didn’t take Karpuk’s metadata class. There are so many wonderful classes and not enough time or allowable credits to take every class that interests me. I admit it: I am a lifelong learner and enjoy going to school.

Part of the fun of a Weblog is having people read it and comment. Even with MT-Blacklist, it becomes too much work to keep up with the blog spammers, so I have most comments turned off. Fortunately, the new version of Movable Type has a preauthorization feature. That will work better for me. However, I need time to install it, and I don’t want to do it if I am going to move to another hosting service. I like my current hosting service except that adding a domain is more than I want to pay.

Researching hosting services takes a lot of time. I spent many hours last week looking at various hosting services. I own three domain names, so I want a hosting service where I can set up at least two of them in a single account. Furthermore, I want a person to be able to type in programmingpeers.com or librarianway.com and get to that page. I don’t want a hosting service that only provides www.hostname.com. I want the person to be able to get to my domains with or without the “www”. I want my own IP (internet protocol) address so that I have better control over security.

My requirements are: Linux or some variant of Unix (I am a Solaris system administrator); ssh access (I hate going through GUI interfaces to do everything, though I like them for some things, like setting up MySQL); 1 MySQL database; PHP; and SSI (server side includes—I use this a lot). Of course, I also want a Web interface to mail, but also pop3 and imap support; spam filtering, full Unix shell support, and my own cgi-bin. And I want this all for no more than $160 a year.

I can find some that will give me everything except ssh/Unix shell access. I need the access. It takes too long to do everything through a GUI.

If any of my librarian colleagues has a Web hosting service provider suggestion, please e-mail me at nodewalker at hotmail dot com. Thanks.