Tip of the Iceberg

Category domino
I've been quite pleased with the performance of my little virtual server (actually, it's more powerful than most of the servers at my current office), so I took the plunge and updated DNS for all of my domains to set the virtual as the primary and the physical as the failover. Haven't gotten around to setting up an ICM (internet cluster manager) to force internet protocols to fail over to the physical server if the virtual one goes monkey on me, but the main benefit in doing that at this point would be to have a chance to test that with little at stake... since none of the sites I host make me any money. Even the most recently launched site, which has become the most popular almost overnight: hits from 6 different countries, at last count. We were bouncing around the idea of following  vowe's example by selling related merchandise via Spreadshirt, but it appears they don't ship to the U.S., so we may go with CafePress instead. Trouble is, I already created a Spreadshirt store and added it to the site, only to find out later about the shipping issue.

I'm being deliberately vague... although the other sites I was already hosting are all either for family members or non-profit organizations (such as the New Mexichords), this newest one is a little... well, vulgar. Not like porn vulgar, just....... screw it. It's BookstorePoop.com. A friend of a friend, who works (surprise, surprise) at a bookstore, felt a need for a therapeutic way of venting about some of her less pleasant workplace experiences, thought others in her line of work might appreciate the same opportunity, and got the idea to start basically a moderated blog: people submit stories that initially go into draft mode, she gets an email notice of the submission, and chooses whether or not to publish the story... so that the vulgarity can at least be mitigated a bit. When she suggested this to a mutual friend of ours, he figured he could do it via PHP / MySQL, but knew the workflow nature of it and the obligatory integration with email made it a perfect candidate for a Domino site. So he hit me up about creating it. Took about three hours to put in everything she wanted and customize the CSS to her preferences... gotta love Domino, although I do feel a bit guilty about lowering its power to this sort of use. But it gives me yet another excuse to play with techniques that I can't justify spending time experimenting on while on the clock. Anyway, if morbid curiosity overtakes you, feel free to take a gander.