Hotchkiss Consulting

It’s New Years Eve, and it has been a very, very long 2008.  The economy is in the drain.  We’re lodged under a solid three feet of snow here in Durango (unheard of this early in the year).  The internet is in a period of transition.  I think 2009 is going to be a year of changes.  New technologies will become common place.

Things I’m looking forward to in 2009:

• First and foremost, getting married.  I’ll be tying the knot on June 26th, and making Becky Peterson my wife.
• The year of the API.  More and more services will open up and allow interactions from outside sites.  This will result in a barrage of new sites providing more functionality than ever before.
• The beginning of the end for basic desktop apps.  This will be the year that google apps and other similar services start to take off.  Are you ready to move your life to the cloud.  (Don’t forget, Hotchkiss Consulting is your source for help in saving your company thousands a year by moving to Google Apps)
• A new president.  Although it will be difficult to get used to a president who speaks proper English, there are worse problems to have.  With this new president, I believe, we’ll see our economy turn around.

I believe that this is a great time to be a technologist, an entreprenuer, and an American.  2009 will be a great year, of this I am sure.  Hopefully, 2009 will also be the year that I start really keeping up on my blog!

Happy new year, everyone!

AKA – why do it the hard way when you can do it the easy way?

So, I know it’s been around for a fairly long time, but I’m a busy guy, so I’m just getting around to it.  But, in under 20 minutes with pipes,  I was able to throw together a “pipe” that will sort through the USGS’s mountain of data and tell me what the current flow of the Animas river through Durango, Colorado is.

There’s just no way to sort through data by hand this quickly.  Pipes makes it easy to aggregate information.  Now that’s web 3.0 for you.

By the way, here’s the PHP code I used to fetch the flow.  Feel free to throw this code into your own site to show the current flow. Go go yahoo pipes!

$response = file_get_contents('http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=augM3IDI3RGi4U7B1L3fcQ&_render=php');
$phpobj = unserialize($response);
$cfs = $phpobj['value']['items']['0']['description'];

So, as my clients know, my web server bit the dust recently. On Sunday it went down. I kept receiving assurances that it would be right back up. This piece is broken, no biggy. Then another piece, then another piece. After 24 hours of reassurances, I finally said “time to go!” and got set up with a new provider. But then there’s the latency in DNS switchovers, the hassle of moving files, and the dreaded discovery of all the information you haven’t backed up recently. Not to mention the databases. I’m a web developer, not a designer, so customers come to me for database-driven content. Everything lives in databases.

So I’m making an early new years resolution.  ‘Tis the season to be redundant.  Fa-la-la-la-la….

I will now offer you, my clients,  some options when it comes to hosting.  I understand that your website is your livelihood, it drives your business just like it drives mine.  A single day that you’re down can cause significant loss, especially if you’re without email for that time!

Continue on to read more about these options:

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