Dreamin' Again

Wow...I'm really slacking on this. Anyway, a few weeks ago, as mentioned by Trevin (whose blog you should read, if you don't already), was the Career Fair. I feel like it was smaller than usual, although the spring career fair is always small, so it could just be perception (I haven't gotten around to going to the office of career services yet and asking). However, there was a company there called DreamHost. They are a web hosting company founded in '97 by four Mudders. They've managed to keep quite a bit of the informal, friendly feeling of Mudd in their company, which is completely amazing...check out their "don't be a jackass" policy (at Mudd we are told during orientation that you'll generally be okay if you try not to be a jackass...it makes everything a lot more chill than it might otherwise be).

In addition to being pretty chill, they're remarkably helpful. They have a status blog to inform you when things go down and a twitter account that will tweet status changes. Beyond that, they have the best administrative backend I've ever seen. They really make it a snap to do most things. The two coolest things that I've come across so far are the one-click installs and SSH access. The second, SSH access, is nice because it lets you have control over your own files in a way that is comfortable to most of the CS majors here at Mudd -- we use the Unix shell for much of our work, so we get quite comfortable using it. Most places only give you FTP access.

The one-click installs are truely cool, though. DreamHost has gotten together a number of popular packages (WordPress, Drupal, ZenPhoto, etc.) and created an incredibly simple installer. You just click on the package you want, it walks you through everything you need to create, and then deploys the package where you asked it to. It also has a button labeled "update" that will update your packages to the most recent release just as easily. Truly, it is crazy.

Anyway, I need to think up a really awesome domain name, and then I'll probably start blogging over there once I graduate.

I'll try to have more updates for you this semester....

~Kyle Marsh