I asked my favorite hosting service,
Seagull Networks, if they could support database hosting, and it turned out they had just started providing it. So I moved
ByteSwap.net from Hostway to Seagull.

I wasn't actually using Hostway's database services yet but I have plans to.

I have no complaints about Hostway except that it felt pretty corporate and impersonal. Whenever I write to the support address for Seagull, I get a personal response from Paul Celestin, the guy who owns the place, sometimes at unusual hours of the night.

I was looking through my logs just now to see what search terms people were using to find the site. This works because most search engines encode your search terms in the URL for the search result page. This is known the GET method. There is a limit to the amount of text that can be in a URL, larger amounts of form data have to be submitted with the POST method.

Anyway I was very pleased to find that a

Google search for cross-platform programming turns up

my first article on Byteswap.net in its first page of search results.

How people struggle to get placement at the top of the search results! All you need to do is put up content that's both unique and valuable to the people you want to come to your site! On the average I get 5,000 unique visitors a month to the whole GoingWare.com website, and for the most part it's because I have
these programming tips there. If I post a new article on one of my sites and post the URL in a few places, traffic will double for about a month, and in the long run will increase a significant amount from what the average used to be.

I guess I should get off my butt and write more articles. I have lots of them planned out in my head but it's hard to find the time to write them. I try to write well, it takes me anywhere from three to ten days to write one of the articles that I have done.

I've hosted various websites with seagull for about five years, and he provides free hosting for
www.wordservices.org in return for a small banner. When I get around to it I'm going to advertise seagull from all my websites because I like Paul that much.

Seagull provides secure shell access, allows you to use CGI's you write yourself, even in a compiled language like C or C++, along with having the GNU development tools installed. (Some hosting services only allow shell or perl scripts, and many only allow you to use CGI's they provide, you can't upload your own.)

I'm not sure if he provides java servlet support or not though. The servers all run Slackware. He also offers hosting where you are root on the machine and it's not shared.

Interested in OS X Development?

Some years ago, Paul used to produce CD's of (classic) Mac OS source code and shareware utilities. The CD series was called Apprentice. I first got to know Paul when he put
my screensavers and the Word Services SDK on it.

With Mac OS X generating such interest, Paul has been interested in bringing back the Apprentice CD. He asked me to compile the CD's for him. One difference is that much of the material on the Cd will be developed just for the CD, and written by yours truly. There will also be open source source code that I collect from wherever I can find it, as well as some shareware.

Instead of selling the CD's directly, Paul is proposing to create something he will call the
OS X Developer's Guild, a community site just for OS X programmers. Members will get the CD I compile, there will be a job board, discussion forums, and because Paul has his own hosting service, hosting service will also be included in the membership.

So far Paul is just trying to find out if there is enough interest to pursue the OS X Developer's Guild. If you're interested, fill in the form at the web page I link above. I will get lots of fun and interesting work to do.