Google AdWords

OK, I am a little disappointed. As you may know, I moved my server to new hardware and I have been very pleased so far in terms of the performance. But, in watching one of Eli The Computer Guy's videos, I was inspired to take a look at the advertising on my site. I have traditionally used Google AdWords, but he was discussing several different monetization approaches and I kind of latched on the an affiliate program he mentioned. Got that up and working and it looks great. But, then I noticed that my Google AdWords were not working. "What did I do to break that?" After a few hours of putzing, I finally found the problem. Google AdWords does not support AdWords on sites that use an IP address or that use ports, both of which I do since I am on a dynamic IP address and Charter blocks port 80. So, now it looks like I need to start looking for a new domain name and dynamic dns service.

Social Media Class

OK, I am really enjoying my social media class. Let me explain, what fires me up about teaching is...well, learning. I love learning. I love technology. I love learning about technology. So this class has been a lot of fun. I have found myself learning quite a bit more about Twitter for example. I have started expanding some of my other social media outlets like LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube. It has forced me to develop some original content to augment traditional materials that I have found. I created a SoftChalk lesson over the basics of Twitter. This is really cool. Can't wait to see how the class progresses.

Server Upgrade

I am so excited. A few months ago, I purchased two use Dell PowerEdge 2950 rack mount servers. They are pretty sweet: Dual Xeon processors, 8 gig or RAM, dual power supplies, dual GB network ports, etc. Unfortunately, I have not had much time to work on them. I desperately needed to due to the performance of my site. But, I finally found a little extra time and it has been well worth it.

I had to first update the bios. The fans exhibited a jet engine noise, indicative of this server. Now, the noise is much more acceptable. I loaded Windows Server 2012 and updated all the patches. I loaded the role so I could create virtual machines of which I created a single instance of a web server. I copied the files from my existing server and loaded them to my local network storage and then configured my new server to serve the files. Just one problem. Charter apparently blocks port 80. So, I configured my old server which is still up an running remotely to forward requests to my new IP address on a different port.

Result? It works great! The response time is SOOOOO much better. This is still a work in progress. I need to bump the RAM, load more VMs, allow students to access VMs remotely, allow students to create web sites on my server for my e-commerce class, and so on. But, this is finally starting to come together nicely.