Mike Griffiths

Looking for a bunch of quit smoking and electronic cigarette articles? Find them on the site below:

Electronic Cigarette Articles

Most of them are great reads, there’s the odd dud though.

I do not often post reviews about providers, good or bad, but I believe in this case the review is well deserved. This company has exceeded my expectations by far in many ways, and to this day continues to do so by helping me keep several high-traffic websites online, without an exorbitant price tag.

A collection of forums and the like are all I host. They’re simple, but receive a staggering amount of traffic that has scared away every shared hosting provider I have tried to use. I tried moving to a unmanaged VPS, but found my lack of server knowledge and experience holding me back. I was just about to go to a managed VPS, until I saw GSID.net’s prices.

GSID.net’s prices for dedicated servers in the specification range I required were almost the same for a similarly spec’ed VPS from most providers. This wasn’t the final thing that caused me to decide though – their price for managed servers was also extremely competitive. After having a brief talk with their precise and prompt live chat staff I ordered the package necessary, and had the migration performed. The migration took far less time than I expected, and everything worked flawlessly. No one on the forums even knew about the change, and I was sure to keep it this way. Some portions of the forums became even faster, thanks to some optimization by GSID.net’s technicians.

I had a slight issue while ordering the package due to a misinterpretation on their side, but it was corrected very quickly and professionally. I have no complaints about this – the mistake was minor, and I was even credited and apologized to multiple times. To be honest I never noticed the mistake until their sales team notified me of it. Any company that treats me like this deserves a raving review, hence my decision to write one.

Right now I am in the process of leasing out more servers in several other locations for my communities, all from this one provider. They offer servers in all the locations I need – the U.S., Asia, and Europe. Dealing with one provider has definitely made managing my bills easier, as well as increase my trust in the reliability of my servers. Very few providers will offer servers in more than one location, and especially ones in other continents. The servers they say will be online within 24 hours, but these guys always use the scotty approach and claim far more time then they actually need. (Reference to Star Trek for those who do not understand.)

I’d recommend GSID.net to anyone who is in need of managed servers, or even just dedicated servers. Their support and expertise is top notch, and my forum users would certainly appreciate all the help they have provided me with in keeping the forums online and fast.

I’ve just started up an electronic cigarette blog and a Squidoo electronic cigarette ‘lens’.

I haven’t used Tumblr before, but I’m impressed from the off. It works out the box, looks great and is pretty idiot-proof. I think they only thing it’s missing is better networking – I have yet to find any other similar blogs without resorting to Google.

Squidoo I have used before, but only briefly. It works well and does what it says on the tin. I also like the revenue sharing through Google AdSense, although I’m not sure quite how well it works as I’m convinced I must have had at least one click after having thousands of visits.

Check them both out.

So, the Apple iPad came out a couple of months back. It’s advertised as being “unbelievable price of $499″, which at first glance is pretty unbelievable, as I can get a pretty high spec computer for that price.

However, I’ve had chance to play with them a few times and someone in work has one. As with most Apple products, it looks good. I like most Apple products apart from the computers (had a lot of issues with them in the past and find OSX to be difficult to work with), and the iPad is no exception.

I was privledged enough to have a play with one before they were released. I wasn’t too impressed with it. Ok, it seemed great when I slid the slider across and got to the menu, but that was about it. Because it was pre-release date there were next to no apps for it available, and those that come with it are fairly limiting. I was bored in less than 3 minutes.

I have since played with a few iPads that have been loaded with apps though, and they do, for the most part, seem pretty good. There are a few decent games, some of which have been ported over from standard platforms, others have been made specifically. Command and Conquer, for example, is pretty slick.

As much as I do like the product, I cannot justify buying them. People who own them swear by them, but whenever I ask them when they use them the only answer I get is “on the toilet mostly” – so it seems to be an expensive toilet break. I think I’d rather spend the money on a new laptop that I can take anywhere and run anything on. It probably won’t look as cool, but I’ll be able to run anything I want, wherever I want, and if I want 3G support I can just pay £5 a month for a dongle, rather than the ~£25 that Apple ask.

As with most Apple products, from day dot there have been a large number of iPad Accessories available, things like iPad socks, sleeves, screen protectors, etc. As with any touch screen device I would highly recommend getting a screen protector to try and protect against scratches. These things get grubby and marked very easily, so it is important to try and protect them.

On my travels round the interwebs I’ve stumbled upon an article I wrote a while ago about Electronic Cigarettes. It appears that someone has published it in my name, and it wasn’t me!

Take a look at the article in question: electronic cigarettes

I use this blog for lots of technical chit chat, and for publishing the odd bit of code. One thing I don’t use it for though, is general crappy ramblings or design-esque talk.

Because of this I’ve just launched my blogger account, it’s over at Mike on design. Over here you’ll find chat about latest design finds, logos and lots of nice looking things.

Enjoy.

Most web developers have their own code base that they refer back to on a regular basis. Many have even developed their own simple platforms that do a lot of the leg work for them, that they know inside out and can easily deploy on a new project.

More recently though, at least in the last 4-5 years, frameworks have been popping up left right and centre. From CakePHP, which is generally considered to be a little unstable, to the super-reliable ZendFramework, built by Zend – the PHP company.

Zend and Cake are not he only frameworks though. After trying a lot, I find my personal favourite to be CodeIgniter, which is built by EllisLabs.

CodeIgniter comes with libraries and helpers that can be activated at any point within the framework. These helpers try and simplify many tedious tasks involved with making web applications. Things like form validation is a breeze, and the functions used are much more powerful than something that can be drummed up quickly in any normal PHP app. Image manipulation is made easy, and emailing through PHP can be done well without needing to load in the bloated PEAR, which the documentation recommends.

CodeIgniter uses standard MVC (Model > View > Controller) to create it’s systems. Although at first glance this can seem a little silly and over-thought, but it makes life a lot easier for everyone involved. The MVC structure is standardised, reliable and fast, and every developer should follow suit with it very easily.

CodeIgniter also makes debugging applications very easy. The built-in profiler shows all of the POST, and GET data, aswell as all database queries. I used a customised version of the profiler that I tweaked to also show SESSION data.

When working with lots of small, simple queries CodeIgniter also makes life easy with active records, their database library. It allows queries to be written with a fraction of the amount of code. Let’s say we want to pull off everything from a table, simple: db->get(’table’) – no need to write a full query to do it. Active records do support large queries with unlimited amounts of JOINs, but my personal preference is to compile these myself and throw them into a normal query using the DB library’s db->query() method – probably because I’m used to the structure of the queries and the syntax so I can spot errors more easily. If you’re not hot on SQL though, you’ll probably benefit massively.

My personal framework recommendation is definitely CodeIgniter, but make sure you check out all of the others available too. CodeIgniter has a massive community that helps solve any problem you may have, the community includes forums and live chat rooms, which the EllisLabs developers often frequent.

The site over at Electronic Cigarette Reviews has recently reviewed Smart Smoker USA. Smart Smoker did excellent, and has been rated the best electronic cigarette company that they have seen.

Head over to the site to take a look.

Electronic Cigarette Reviews

Electronic Cigarette is quite a new product to hit the market. The tiny devices are powered by a small battery, and are the size of a real cigarette. The e-cigs take cartridges about the size of a finger nail which contain nicotine and last about the same length of time as a pack of 15-20 cigarettes.

So why buy one of these things? Well the base unit costs about $50, not as cheap as a cigarette. The cartridges though, they cost around 70c, and are the equivalent of about 15-20 cigarettes. That’s a massive difference in price. The average smoker (20/day) saves around $2,000.00 per year using these things.

Not only is it easy on the wallet, but the electronic cigarette is harmless, and contains none of the nasty things that you’d normally find in a cigarette – there’s no tar, no carbon monoxide/dioxide and they don’t stink, give you bad breath, or make you go yellow.

The e-cigs look and feel real. When you take a pull on one the end lights up the same as a real cigarette would, and the device even smokes just like a real cigarette, the only difference is that the device’s smoke is actually water vapour, making it totally harmless and odour free.

Electronic Cigarette

A couple of nights ago I decided to do a little experiment. I was going to create a generic website with a few hundred pages of content, SEO the hell out of it, and see if I can earn anything from AdSense.

The website is All Phobias, and it lists every ‘known’ phobia out there. It’s written in PHP ontop of CodeIgniter. I created a small C app to scrape all of the data off a few different websites and generate some SQL for me. All in all the whole thing took about 4 hours to make. The design is some crappy free one I downloaded, as I’m not really interested in how it looks.

I’ve made sure every page has everything it should like unique titles, h1 tags and all the meta tags to go with it. I have also made a couple of blogs on external websites and made 5-10 posts on each, some linking to the site, and some not. I’ve submitted to some free submission sites, as well as linking from all of my major sites with a decent page rank.

I’ve submitted a hefty sitemap (I think there were 750 pages) to Google, but the domain is still in the incubation period, so I guess I’ll need to wait a couple of months to see any real progress.

Since the site went live 2 nights ago it’s earnt me a whopping £2. Which, to be honest, isn’t bad at all. If I can earn £1 a night from 2 nights work then I’ll be a happy man. Do the math on that, 15 sites per month, for 6 months, that would be ~£90 per day, or £2.7k a month. Not bad. My hope is that in 6-8 months time it will be top of Google for a lot of keywords ‘all phobias’, along with many of the actual phobia names and short descriptions (’fear of spiders’, for example), at which point the £1 a day would easily jump up to £5-10 per day, with a bit of luck.