Lauren Wu dot com

You know when something is reaching epidemic proportions when the US news picks up on breakouts of disease in Asia, in this case, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). I wasn't surprised to hear that Singapore was quarantining people with the disease because they tend to be... uh... more "involved" with their citizens than other countries, but now Hong Kong is following suit. I even received a message today that a "Public Announcement is being issued to alert U.S. citizens... [that] the Government of Ontario declared a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) to be a provincial emergency." Scary stuff.

I initially used Yahoo! Web Hosting to host this site. I liked them because:

• They're a big company, and will be in business for a long time
• They have lots of tools and wizards to quickly get a simple site up and running
• There's great integration with other Yahoo! products & services

However, I am switching providers because Yahoo! is is just way too limiting. Hey, I'm no HTML/XML/website wizard, but there were some really basic things that they did not support which I thought was ludicrous. It all started when I wanted to put links to my blogger archives on my main blogger page (as opposed to creating a separate page of links for my archive). Simple right? ...Especially when you have gurus like Phil Ringnalda providing instructions which are now part of the unofficial Blogger FAQ. WRONG. I spent hours trying to this to work until I found out that the problem is GeoCities/Yahoo! requires javascript files to have a ".js" extension, and won't allow other ones like ".html". Since I was planning on archiving only once a month anyway, I was willing to live with the fact that I would have to now MANUALLY update the link to my archives.

What made me finally switch was when I tried implementing Tara's version of Sascha's script for adding a PHP-based commenting system to my blogs. I've spent a long time on this already (and still haven't got it to work), but I was primarily held up because Yahoo! doesn't support the chmod command. Yes, you heard me correctly, and I even have the email from their customer service to prove it.

My next job was to find a new hosting provider. What I didn't realize is how many there are out there! They all look the same, sound the same, have the same pricing structure... Fortunately, I found a site called WebHostingTalk that has forums where people discuss providers. It was there that I stumbled across Altera Hosting. Their customers rave about their performance & service on the forums so I thought I'd give them a shot. Hey, at $5/month with no initial service fee, why not? It's too early to give a comprehensive assessment, but so far, they have responded to all my emails within the hour, which is the same amount of time (possibly less) that it took for them to create my account. I'm impressed.

After only 3 years (I first purchased the website LaurenWu.com in 2000), I have finally managed to put up a personal website, albeit a primitive one. I originally had elaborate plans, complete with dancing GIFs and graphics galore, but decided against it. There's lots of other things I have to work on right now, including figuring out how to implement a server-based commenting system that is compatible with Blogger.com.