In addition to my normal job which keeps me very busy I am working on several other personal 'side' projects.  These reflect my interests and hobbies and pretty much consume my spare time when it's cold outside.  One part of these hobbies is running my own servers.  I have purchased and installed my own servers at home for all my web hosting and email needs.  These servers have run various Linux flavors and or FreeBSD over the years.  Recently I've been purchasing refurbished rack mount servers in an effort to be ready for the day when I decide to purchase rack space.  Basically I have a small web hosting business in my basement.  Except that it is for me and my wife only.

So what are my projects?

Christian Music Entertainment Group, LLC

This is a company my wife I own and someday hope to actually open for business.  We own a set of domain names to go with the business with the primary one being www.christianmp3.com.  The initial plan is to let independent artists offer up to 10% (1 of every 10 songs) of their music listed with us for free the remaining songs will be sold with a percentage of each song sold being paid to the artist.  As we move forward we will be contacting as many artists as possible that used to list their music on ChristianMp3.com to explain our new situation and draw up licensing contracts to sell their music.  Future plans including selling CD's on plastic and Band Gear (T-shirts, posters and what ever else you have to sell).  Over all this should prove to be a good value to both the artists and Christian Music fans.

I have a lot of work to do on this site/application.  I originally programmed it all in PHP since the price was right.  Then I won a fully licensed copy of New Atlanta's BlueDragon JX server.  I re-wrote everything is CFML.  But now my skills have upgraded and I have to re-factor for OO.  Everything is already MVC so at least that much is right.  I also have to plan and build the business and band administrations applications. Work has kept me so busy that I have not done as much as I should.  These sites are designed by me and pretty much display the best of my design abilities. 

Wilgeno.com

I'm also into politics.  To be specific, Conservative politics.  Please don't confuse the last eight plus years of Republicans with Conservatives.  Alright, that is the end of my political talk on this blog.  I promise to keep the politics at www.wilgeno.com.

Pork In The Pines

It's not kinky, it's a biker rally and pig roast that my wife and I have attended and helped organize for the past three years.  When I finally tear myself away from the computer and the temperatures get above 40F we go riding.  My wife and I are avid motorcyclists and we've toured the nearby states on two wheels.  Porkinthepines.com is the rally website that I slapped together last year.  I took some really old CF code that was in the Fusebox 2.0 style and partly re-factored it for OO.  I just wanted to get it done fast.  Also note that I am not a designer to the site isn't very pretty, but it worked. It provided information pages, a registration page, a map page and a full content management and registered user adminstration section.

CF/JVM Monitoring Dashboard

This is a spin off of the ColdFusion and JVM monitoring tools I wrote for work.  I am in the process of making that tool a stand alone application.  I have many ideas for it and plan to make it free for all.  It is not meant to replace the commercial monitoring products, but rather be an easy way to monitor your CF servers.  I have other motives also most of which are simply educational. I figure this application will give me an avenue to learn Flex and Air.  I have not officially released any code yet, but I have given older customized copies to a few people and have heard all positive reviews. 

BlogCFC

I'm not officially working on it for Ray, but I did convert it to work with PostgreSQL.  Look for the blog post with the code for download so you can use BlogCFC with PostgreSQL also.

This Blog

Then there is the writing I do for this blog.  I hopefully will continue to post about the stuff I've learned over the years realting to CF and servers.

Server Administration

This is a hobby and a necessity since I plan to eventually open the virtual doors of Christianmp3.com.  The more I learn about server administration the longer I can go without hiring a systems administrator.   I've been doing server stuff since about 2001 and I find it challenging, confusing and highly rewarding when I get it right.

So far these are the servers/services I have running.  Centos 64 based Web server with BlueDragon JX 64bit, PostgreSQL 8.1 64bit on another Centos 5.2 64 server.  I have my own email and DNS server on an old PIII550 (this is the next one to get upgraded).  I also run my own SVN server, FTP, file server and VPN.  Overall, I manager 10 domains with email for each from these domains.  Some of the domains are just parked for now waiting for future projects.

The learning never ends.