We have upgraded our webmail service to the latest software version which fully supports the brand new Firefox 3.

If you experience any trouble please do not hesitate to report it.

eWeek has an interesting article up about Gemstone Software’s presentation at RailsConf 2008, where MagLev was introduced. This introduction has set the Ruby on Rails community abuzz, and has created a good amount of controversy.

So what is MagLev anyway? It is a Ruby environment, based on the mature and extremely robust Gemstone/S, an enterprise grade Smalltalk virtual machine.

Why is it a big deal? In one word: performance. Even at this early stage of development it seems to outperform all other Ruby interpreters and VMs by many orders of magnitude.

Why does it matter? It could settle the “Ruby is slow” and “Rails doesn’t scale” arguments for good, as well as kicking down the doors for Ruby on Rails adoption in the enterprise market.

Relevant links:
Ruby and other gems - Avi Bryant, creator of Seaside and a lead developer in the MagLev team compares Gemstone/S + Seaside with a Ruby on Rails stack, giving us some insight about where Gemstone is going with this project.
Maglev - Chad Fowler, gives some background on the project origins and presents some ideas about why MagLev matters.

If you use PHP in your website, many times you may get a blank page
or something does not work properly. In these cases, it helps to look
at the errors generated by PHP. On ServerGrove servers, display_errors
is turned off (so errors are not sent to the browser embedded in pages).

In order to view the PHP errors you have two options:

a) look at the error_log of apache. This file is located in
statistics/log/error_log and contains all errors from Apache, including
those from PHP.
b) turn on display_errors (this is recommended only
for testing and troubleshooting). To turn display_errors on, create a
file called .htaccess (using the File Manager in the Control Panel) and
put the following line inside:
php_flag display_errors 1
Next, all PHP errors will be included in your HTML. Remember to turn off this feature when you are done.

http://my.servergrove.com/knowledgebase.php?action=displayarticle&catid=4&id=82

Once in a while I come across a product that is worth sharing with
our clients. This is not one of our products and we are not affiliated
with it in any way, however, if you are a site owner or web designer we
think you might like this one. Cushy CMS is simple Web 2.0 web site
editor. It is web based and requires no software and just to sweeten
the deal, it’s free. What’s the catch? Well you can’t use Cushy CMS to
create new pages, only edit existing ones and you need to assign the
editable regions to your site prior the editing with Cushy CMS.
Fortunately prepping the site to be edited is as easy as adding a CSS
class tag to the regions you wish to edit.

After viewing the video (http://www.cushycms.com/) on the Cushy CMS homepage I signed up for the service to take a test drive of this new application.

The first step was to prep our webpages to tell Cushy CMS. This was
easy, since I already use styles to layout my pages all I had to do was
add the class=”cushycms” to the sections I wanted to be editable. Once
I finished assigning the editable regions I uploaded my page back to
the server and turned back to Cushy CMS.

I configured my first site by entering the URL, my FTP username and
password and set my httpdocs directory as default directory. Easy
enough and it was nice to notice that Cushy CMS allows you to edit
multiple sites with a single login.

Once the site was set up all I had to do was pick the page I wanted
to edit. The editable regions showed up in a nicely formatted wyswyg
editor. Editing text was a breeze but unfortunately there was no image
upload feature. Images have to already be uploaded for you to insert
them.

Overall it was an excellent experience. It is not a full blown CMS
and has some limitations, but it is a great tool to allow site owners
to edit the text on their site on their own. Cushy CMS also has a pro
plan for $28 a month that allows you to private-label the CMS. Cushy
CMS is fully compatible with our hosting products.

To learn more or sign up for Cushy CMS check out http://www.cushycms.com

We recently upgraded PHP to the latest stable version 5.2.6

This release addressed several bugs and security issues.

Continuing with our commitment to deliver the best possible service, we just upgraded Symfony Framework to 1.0.14. This is purely a bug fix release. For more information, check out the release announcement.

We have just become an official Zend Framework Hosting Partner. Zend framework is the premier PHP framework and we are pleased to say that we are committed to maintain the standards required.

We are currently testing a new Webmail software. If you would like to beta test it, you can do so by going to http://webmail.servergrove.com/rcmail/

We would love to hear about your experience with the new software. Please let us know what you think, as well as make suggestions or report any problems you might encounter. Please send feedback to feedback_at_servergrove.com

At ServerGrove we care about security. We perform upgrades and apply software patches to our servers diligently to prevent malicious users from gaining access to our servers and your accounts. Even so, it is a good practice to change your password regularly. Set up a recurring schedule event to notify you of the need to change your password. Every 3 months is a good period. For new passwords, use a combination of letters and numbers, lowercase and uppercase, and include punctuation characters like “.,-” . You won’t believe how common it is for users to use their name, domain or just the word password as their passwords. It does not matter that we keep our servers secure if your password can be easily guessed by a hacker. Do you want to be reminded every 3 months to change your password? If so, send an email to passwordreminder_at_servergrove.com and we will send you an email reminder every 3 months! Forward this message to all the users on your domain so they can also be reminded and help keep your account safe.