My greatest problem was that the pubDate field requires a RFC 2822 formatted time stamp. Whirlpool not providing that on their page I began writing up a parser module that could handle each website and parse the date from there; however I found that whirlpool had many sources, many of which don’t provide the time their article was published. My final solution was simply to set each article to be published at 10am AEST, which isn’t great but it was better than any other method I could think of (including stuff with databases and a mixture of database + parser).

I have put the source code up here: http://fergofrog.com/wproundup/roundup2rss.py. It is released under GPL 2.0, if you want a copy of the license you can find it at http://fergofrog.com/wproundup/gpl-2.0.txt. Feel free to adapt it to your needs, or to another website, that’s why it is released under GPL and if you do then feel free to leave a comment about it, I’ll be interested to see what you have done.

If you just want the feed I generate it every hour and it is at http://fergofrog.com/wproundup/wproundup.rss. If you do use this feed please go easy on me and set your reader to check it at a minimum of 20 minutes, it is hosted on my home internet connection and if I get pounded every minute by someone I am going to have to take it down. As I said it is generated every hour (at one minute past the hour) so even at 20 minutes per. check you aren’t going to see anything new until after 3 checks.

If you notice any problems with the feed please let me know in the comments, or my email address is in the source code.

So I went ahead and wrote one, this was strange for me as I had never touched perl before, and I am not a huge fan of regex – but I quickly read up on some basic perl and found this excellent reference to regex in perl, copied the template (and referenced the old module in places) and got to work. I realise that if you go into pisg’s repository you will see that 6 months ago weechat3.pm was committed (I only learnt this a few hours ago), but I feel my module is more superior as it returns the kick reason and mode changes (which is not done by weechat3.pm).

I have put up an example of the generated output from the #linux4nano channel on freenode (this won’t be frequently updated, it is just an example) at http://fergofrog.com/pisg-weechat/ and a copy of the module is available at http://fergofrog.com/pisg-weechat/weechat.pm. Feel free to do what you want with it and if you find any bugs just leave a comment here with some way of contacting you and I’ll try to get it fixed as soon as possible.

Support

First I’ll start off with their support, which I had experience with several times. Living in Australia means that calling a support line isn’t very feasible, when I initially chose my host (back in 2005) support was a key deciding factor and HostMonster’s support was (in my experience) a very professional and helpful one. The live chat service was the best support I have ever experienced – often it took less than two minutes to be connected to someone, who more often-than-not could promptly answer my question, or solve my problem. Additionally, for those typical accounting questions, and other common questions their Support Centre had the answer.

Pricing

You can see on their Hosting Features page a breakdown of their service. I would like to point out that all those unlimited services are truly (or as close as it gets, while still having a numeric value) unlimited (yes storage, transfers, domains, sub-domains and email addresses are unlimited). Here is a breakdown of pricing (accurate at time of writing – it appears that they have a special on at the moment, I will update this when it is over):
12 Months: $5.95 (per month) * 12 = $71.40
24 Months: $5.95 (per month) * 24 = $142.80
36 Months: $5.95 (per month) * 36 = $214.20
There is only one plan offered so that is a flat price that includes everything shown on the Hosting Features page, one free domain (for as long as you have hosting with them), free whois privacy and no set-up fee. HostMonster also provides several addon services:

• Additional Domain Names = $10.00 each year
• Dedicated IP = $30.00 each year [$2.50 mo.]
• SSL Certificates = $45.00 each year
• Postini Mail Filtering = $1.00/mo per e-mail address [prorated]

I only had experience with the additional domain name, which was a very convenient service allowing me to manage two domains through the one interface (additionally if you already own a domain then you can point it to HostMonster’s DNS servers for free, or transfer it at $10 per year).

Service

Overall HostMonster’s service was fantastic. The unlimited disk space and transfers was one of the greatest services around. The transfer speeds was often very good, averaging ~2mbps from their servers. The script processing time was speedy and really what you would expect (nothing too special, or too slow). However, being on a shared server if you hog the server’s resources you will find your account being suspended until you can prove that the issue has been resolved (often it’s an overly popular file, or a buggy script).

They run the latest version of cPanel (11.25.0 – at time of writing), which has a very nice customisable UI, and some very advanced controls – allowing for some very advanced options to be changed. The best demonstration of their control panel is their Demo Panel, which is exactly what a real customer gets.

They provide 100 MySQL and PostgreSQL databases respectively, which makes hosting forums, blogs, etc very easy to do. They additionally provide PHP5, Perl, Python, Ruby and Ruby on Rails; I however only have experience with their support for PHP, which was as you would expect from any top host. They allow access to your files through FTP, SSH (although you have no send in photo ID to enable) and through the control panel. Finally they allow access to email through POP3, IMAP, RoundCube, SquirrelMail and Horde, and the ability to send emails through SMTP and the aforementioned webmail clients.

Summary

Overall I was extremely happy with HostMonster’s service, support and pricing. I have moved over to self hosting, but this isn’t due to HostMonster – I changed primarily because I wanted more flexibility in how I run my domain, and to have full control on what services I run through my domain. I would highly recommend HostMonster too everyone with any level of experience, their exceptional support, impressive pricing and features and their overall professional and functional service makes HostMonster a brilliant host.

My aim for the blog is to document some things I’m doing, hopefully provide some help to someone and also maybe post up some interesting news that I hear around the places. Well that’s the aim anyway, but knowing my track record I’ll fail soon.