Life of a Webmaster

The life of a webmaster is not an easy one. Most of us don’t do this to earn a profit (a few lucky ones have, though), nor to win fame and fortune (I don’t foresee myself ever being the recipient of a Webby Award), nor even to be on the coveted list of A-List bloggers (if you’re blogging in hopes of making that list, you’re blogging for the wrong reason). I’ve been on the Web a long time now (in terms of “Web years” that is). I’ve watched the memes come and go. I remember the snobbishness of some webmasters who proudly proclaimed that they only used Notepad to craft their pages (if you’re still using Notepad, you’re out of the loop and years behind… we have professional-level text editors complete with color-coded tags and other niceties these days).

I remember when animated .gifs were all the rage, which led, in turn, to some really horrid-looking pages online. I’m sure you’ve seen them in passing… like a two bit flea market complete with flashing googaws. marquis or rainbow text, dhtml page transitions, javascript that greeted the visitor with their name in a popup, custom cursors, etc. It all was rather overwhelming in a kind of Orwellian precursor to “all the ads all the time”… or perhaps the well-traveled corner of some red light district of a major urban development.

Then came the marketers and their big ideas of what the Web should be like… banner ads, popups, popunders, spyware, adware, link exchanges, affiliate programs, bleh-bleh-bleh… they’re still trying all of this in various corners online, though the vast majority of self-respecting webmasters realized the game that was being played was not one that would benefit them in any significant way. The current “game” seems to involve browsers… Who’s Better and Who’s Best… at blocking all the things that were previously hailed as The Next Big Thing.

I have to wonder where it’s all leading. I’m currently seeing programming taking a turn for the Web and away from the Desktop. Gmail is a good example. MyYahoo seems to be headed in a similar direction. I’m not sure if this evolution in programming is a good thing or not, there’s a lot of ways of looking at it. On the one hand, you can run a web-based application from any computer, anywhere, any time, regardless of what operating system it’s running. On the other hand, when an application is server-centric, you’re subject to the whims of the server administration or host, and if the server goes down, you’re cut off from access to anything you created with that web-based application. On the plus side, though, you’re assured that the application itself is always the same for anyone running it… you’ve all got the latest and greatest version to work with. On the minus side, it’s all in one place, and having spent the greater part of the last (eek!) nine years fighting against the fuckheads who just want to destroy things online, having everything in one place brings with it a certain vulnerability and a concern with security.

If your data consists of only a lifelog diary, it may not matter so much to you if it’s lost. On the other hand, if your data consists of a lifetime’s worth of research and papers you have written based on that research, it’s understandable to have concerns… and yes, backups too. One of the problems, however, that some people may not have thought of is backward compatibility. How do you know that in ten years you will even be able to open up those backup files on the computer you will have then? The music and movie industries are also working hard everyday to ensure that today’s file formats will likely not be viable in another ten years, forcing you to buy new licenses for whatever music or entertainment you may have already paid for three or four times… and I assure you, the “artists” are not seeing the money they were promised from either residual sales or from those added fees on recordable CDs and DVDs. Not one red cent has been paid to artists to date. And that’s not pennies, it’s millions of dollars.

But anyway… the life of a webmaster… a conscientious webmaster tries to ensure that the content they provide will always remain accessible. Many of us work very hard at that, but of course, there can be no guarantees made because we can’t exactly predict what will happen in the future. This is especially true in the case of data stored on a remote server, which can fail due to hardware, hackers, or Net-prowling worms or viruses. In most cases, the webmaster has very little control over what happens to the server unless it’s a computer in their own house. This is not to say that webmasters don’t think about security, most do, but even at a site as large as microsoft.com, it’s possible for bad things to happen and data can be lost or become inaccessible.

So what can a webmaster do to mitigate the effects of data loss? First, they can choose a reliable, knowledgeable host for their web site. Choosing a host is a bit like fumbling around in a dark room, searching for the light switch. All webhosts will tell you they are the best, their uptime is close to 100%, they’re security-minded, etc. You can expect them all to say that because they are, after all, attempting to attract customers. Keep in mind that just because a webhost’s plan is inexpensive, doesn’t mean that they are a shoddy webhost. By the same token, just because they charge what seems to be a lot each month, doesn’t mean they are the best. Word-of-mouth is one way to find a good webhost, but what if you don’t know any other webmasters? Then you have to rely on online reports, which may or may not be unbiased. There are a few sites online that rate webhosts and post reviews by customers, and those can often be good indications of who is reliable and who isn’t. Another thing to keep in mind is, sometimes a webhost will be fantastic for years and you’ll read great reviews about it… but then the company changes ownership, or sometimes an economic downturn puts a crunch on the host, and things will suddenly take a turn for the worst. That’s kind of what happened at my old hosts. They were fine for years, but this past year, things were not so good. At least once a month, the domain would suddenly and without warning be unreachable. At one point, somehow the vhosts file was completely screwed up and I found myself FTPing into other peoples’ accounts, or I’d load up one of my web pages and suddently find myself on some other completely unrelated site that was not my own. The final straw came last August when the RAID array went bad, and I found out that the backups were also on that array. I had month-old backups, and was able to salvage some other data, but I still ended up losing two weeks worth of work.

I’ve participated in several online projects that suddenly folded when the webhosts disappeared. Fortunately, I wasn’t the one who chose the webhosts, so I couldn’t be blamed, yet at the same time, work I’d done was lost. These days, I’m more cautious about putting a lot of time or work into sites I haven’t set up or wasn’t the one who picked the webhost. When you lose weeks or even years of work due to a host closing shop, you quickly learn to keep backups of all your work, or withdraw from participating in anything you don’t have administrative access to. That’s not to say that data won’t still get lost or hosed in the process of running a website. Shit happens, as they say.

I’ve had two sites get totally hosed by their own popularity. I wasn’t prepared for that, but I imagine it must be a lot like getting slashdotted. In one case, I had to restore the site from a flatfile dump of the database… thousands of posts. I never EVER want to do that again. Thus, at the present time, I am taking a very slow course in building both this domain and in planning for moving my other domain to this server. There is, really, no hurry in getting this done, and I’d like to be relatively sure I’m choosing the best applications to serve up my sites. Security is foremost in my mind these days.

My sister, SwampQueen, is currently sitting there nodding her head at me because her computer has been hosed by something nasty picked up online, and I need to get over there and patch things up, if I can. Unfortunately, she is on dial-up, which makes things somewhat difficult. I’ve already thought of taking the laptop over there with the applications I’ll need, but then found out the laptop has no ethernet connection, and she has no router, of course. It’s not her or her husband’s fault their computer isn’t working right, they’re new to all of this and didn’t know that the average “safe” time of a new computer hooking up to the internet is now only 22 minutes before it is compromised. With her dial-up connection, it can take a lot longer than that just to use WindowsUpdate.

As the geeky one in the family, as well as being a webmaster, it’s my responsibility to fix things when they go wrong. At the same time, I can’t help but feel a bit resentful towards Microsoft for not making all new PCs as safe as they could possibly be before they ever leave the stores. Needless to say, my attitude towards the BlackHats and Spammers is a lot more hostile. Therefore, I will (and do) take every measure and tool I can get my hands on to stave them off for just a little while longer… it’s irritating that the internet has become like this. It didn’t used to be like this, you know. I remember my first time online, I was using a library computer, and I wanted to send an email to the webmaster of a site I liked… but since I didn’t have an email address, I just made one up, clicked send, and it sent. The recipient actually got the email, too, but he couldn’t reply because it was a bogus email address. That’s how things used to work, simple, quick, pain-free.

You can never go home again.