Technology Archives - Page 7 of 9

What do we mean by “open-source”?

An open-source program is much more than public access to a codebase. It’s about opening up a living project for participation from anyone who wants to get involved any soft or website development . When executed properly for an appropriate project, an open-source program can help drive substantial improvements in the quality of your product.

One of the key reasons companies open-source projects is that they want the community to get involved. Popular projects receive significant contributions from the community, and they get it for free.

It’s not necessarily out of altruism. People and organizations consume projects because they see a personal or business benefit. When the project doesn’t meet their needs or expectations, they may use the opportunity to address bugs or add features. Rather than hold these improvements back in private forks, they are compelled to contribute those changes back into the source repository to become part of the project baseline. This virtuous cycle of improvement is why many businesses produce software using the open-source model.

Azure DevOp Pipelines- Add a testing widget to your Dashboard

Andy and Mara are excited to show Amita the progress they’ve made. They’ve already set up a dashboard. Now they can monitor pull requests and visualize the health of their builds.

In this unit, you add a widget to your dashboard to help visualize your test runs over time.

Amita takes a look and is excited.

Amita: This is great progress. Thank you! Not to sound ungrateful, but is there any way I can see just a brief overview of the test results over time?

Mara: Yes! Microsoft Azure DevOps lets you add widgets to your dashboards. It only takes a few minutes. Let me show you.

Add the widget to the dashboard

In your Azure DevOps project, select Overview, and then select Dashboards.

Note If you ran the template to create the Azure DevOps project, you won't see the dashboard widgets you set up in previous modules.

Select Edit.
In the Add Widget pane, search for Test Results Trend.
Drag Test Results Trend to the canvas.
Select the gear icon to configure the widget.a. Under Build pipeline, select your pipeline.b. Keep the other default settings.
Select Save.
Select Done Editing.

Although the website builders widget displays only one test run, you now have a way to visualize and track test runs over time. Here’s an example that shows a few successful test runs.

If you begin to see test failures, you can click a point on the graph to navigate directly to that build.

cPanel and Ongoing madness associated with Hosting Companies

About the ongoing madness associated with hosting companies and their moves away from cPanel.

Liqudiweb, SiteGround, Godaddy, and a number of others are going through some rather painful growing pains in trying to jump ship away from cPanel. And customers are feeling that pain first hand. Tales of migration nightmares are rampant in the forums.

Last year’s cPanel rate changes have literally forced many hosts to take drastic action, by either hanging their hats on unproven control panels or by developing their own (aka, the” Godaddy’s Model”).

If you’ve lived in the hosting industry for a while, you are well aware of the Godaddy “control panel problem”. It’s just not easy to develop an easy to use, secure control panel, with all of the features web design professionals require. Toss in email management and DNS management and support and you’ve got a support training nightmare that seemingly never ends.

It’s not technology that makes a hosting company work, it’s people that make it work.

Sure, you can go with the “cloud” hosting solution route, geek out on self-training, Youtube videos ad nauseam, and run wild with a host that provides no support in a crisis. Who’s got time for that! I’m in the business to make money and serve my clients by giving them the best possible long-term options, so I can get more clients and make more money with the least amount of effort.

So back to conventional hosting. cPanel is the highest grade solution. But moving from the nearly perfect well-supported solution to a mediocre and rushed alternative, well, the results are fairly easy to predict.

So back to the subject at hand. Liquidweb and others are trying. And maybe in a year or two, they’ll have trained their people well enough to succeed in the transition process from something that’s well supported and relatively easy to manage to their flavor of the month control panel option.

For the time being, if you are with a host who is in the transition away from cPanel, get ready for a rough ride. Or, end the pain today by simply moving to an established cPanel host who is more zen in accepting what works best for their customers.

Thought for the day. Does your host value you as a customer, or consider you an expendable beta tester for their new control panel?

Your thoughts?