The Reluctant Blogger

When I started building JobVent.com several years ago, I hadn’t done so much as a “Hello World” application in PHP. That paired with my lack of knowledge at the time concerning all things CSS led to what was declared by Techcrunch as a site “who’s layout and look screams 1996″.

Well, as much as I did enjoy the late ’90s (college was a blast), it was time to bring JobVent.com forward into the current decade. We’ve got divs, style sheets, even a bit of Ajax for good measure. Don’t worry. We didn’t go overboard. All the data is the same and the surveys haven’t changed. But the site is easier to navigate, read, and just looks better.

We kept the orange theme, despite all the comments against it. Why do people hate orange? It works for Dunkin’ Donuts.

So send any comments you may have about the new design. If you encounter any issues (as a lot of the underlying code changed as well) send them along.

A huge thanks goes to Greg at Raizlabs for help with the new design. Greg is a usability expert and his input on this project has been invaluable.
 

If you are a small company and planning on hosting your site and web services at Media Temple, stop.

All our PicMe stuff was hosted over on Media Temple. We went with them initially because of their claims of scalability. We still think they would have been a scalable solution, but the headaches just weren’t worth it anymore.

What were the headaches? Performance and a definitive lack of support.

Performance:

We’re doing photo sharing, so we’ve been serving up a lot of images. The performance of our application as a whole is dependent on the speed at which it can retrieve files from our web host. And this proved to be a significant bottleneck on Media Temple. In fact, we ran a comparison between the speed at which Media Temple could serve plain old JPEG files vs. the same exact files on a DreamHost account. DreamHost was at least 4 times faster. So just by switching to what amounts to a CHEAPER account, we get a 4x boost in our application performance. File requests weren’t the only bottleneck; PHP processing appears to suffer the same constraints on Media Temple. So not only are our file retrievals faster on DreamHost, the core processing of our web service and XML responses are around 4x faster as well.

Support:

We wanted to give Media Temple a chance. So we told them about the performance issues, even gave them access to our scripts on DreamHost and Media Temple so they could see the speed comparison for themselves. After briefly looking into the issue, here was their response:

The issue you are experiencing, may take some time to resolve. Unfortunately, we cannot give you an ETR at this point. If the server performance is unacceptable for your needs, then may want to want to look into another host for now. We promise you that we will get this issue resolved and we would appreciate if you considered us again in the future. Again we would like to apologize for not being able to assist you further and provide you with the service that you were looking for.

So we were basically told to go away. Fine.

During the migration away from Media Temple, with whom we initially registered one of our domains, we ran into a problem redirecting the domain to use the new name server at DreamHost. On the phone with Media Temple we were told that it “isn’t a big enough problem yet” and that “no one else has reported this issue yet” so they were not going to do anything about it. Huh? I understand that they use a third party to handle their registrations (OpenSRS), but we are a customer, and a service you are providing is not working. Don’t tell me its not a big enough problem yet. Get OpenSRS on the phone and fix the issue. Don’t tell me you won’t even call them because it’s not a big problem. For us, a (former) paying customer, it’s a huge problem.

But now Media Temple has lost us as a customer, and they’ve also lost all future referrals from everyone here at Raizlabs. I’ve used DreamHost for several years on JobVent.com, and the migration from Media Temple for the PicMe stuff was painless. If you need a host, avoid Media Temple, but do consider DreamHost.

So all the other examples I was able to find had drag drop enabled where the images were embedded. As soon as I tried setting the source to a URL or local file instead of a embedded resource, the drag operation would no longer display the image I was dragging.

The solution to this problem was to copy the bitmap data generated by the load of an mx:Image object. See the source below:


private function mouseMove(event:MouseEvent):void
{
if(isDragging)
return;

isDragging = true;
DragManager.doDrag(this, dragSource, event, dragProxy);
}
}