Mikeiscool is Fully Operational

Well, after much sweat, a few tears, and fortunately no blood, I've managed to get my little corner of cyberspace in presentable shape. I'm happy to announce that in addition to several decent looking web pages, I now have a functioning email system, as well as this enormously entertaining and insightful blog that you're reading (that's right, dammit, you're VERY entertained). Originally (as some of you may have read), I was trying to run my own email server locally, but found that my ISP won't allow that. So I chose RegisterFly to host it for me. It occurred to me, after realizing I had little choice but to go with a "hosted" solution, that this would actually provide me a way of accessing my mail when I'm away from home. I was shooting for this with some of my email server install attempts, but had pretty much abandoned it as one of the potential causes of trouble before I realized the problem was my ISP.

So, when I started looking into the whole blog thing, I was considering going with a "hosted" option as well. I didn't really like that, mind you. I don't know why, maybe it's the geek in me, but I just don't care for the idea of my stuff sitting on someone else's server. It's not like I'm trading corporate secrets or have the Colonel's secret 11 herbs and spices list stashed somewhere, but I just like to be in full control of my site and I feel that I'm somewhat limited in that when it's hosted somewhere else. I guess I also feel the potential of some company arbitrarily changing what they charge for their "hosted" services, and if all my cyber-eggs are in their binary-basket, well I'm gonna have to pony up the dough. Anyway, I found Blogger which appeared to be free and would let me access it from anywhere. However, I couldn't make it cooperate with my FTP client (and no, I still don't know why, but it's definitely a Blogger problem, ProFTP rules!). So, as I've mentioned earlier, I found Thingamablog , and I love it. The issue became, well if it lives on my server, how do I post to it when I'm not at my server? The solution? LogMeIn ! Now I can just connect to one of my network computers, compose my blog, and use the FTP function that's built into Thingamablog  to push it over to my server. It may sound convoluted to you, but it works for me.

Anyway, I'm glad to be up and running. Check out all of Mikeiscool , especially the Music Page . If any of you reading this are in need of any music for commercial use, please feel free to contact me at mike@mikeiscool.net and I'll get back in touch with you. I compose music of many different varieties and styles. My stuff's been on The Sopranos so, hey man, I've got a little "street cred". Thanks for visiting, and drop me a line if you dig the tunes.