I have to write this post. This is the only legal way I know how to fight against this kind of business owners and companies in my country.

The problem is discrimination of female candidates on job interviews, and the problem is huge in my country currently. I am even pretty traditional guy, I do think that there are some jobs on this earth that women should simply not do, but discriminating the female candidate only because she may get pregnant a year or two after her employment has started is simply stupid. It is even more stupid if the job that she is applying for is “thinking kind of a job” not something where her strength would limit her.

Recently, people from Beohemija , a Serbian household cleaning products company, contacted me, trough a mutual friend, with one request. They needed a person for web developer position, and wanted to know if I have somebody to recommend. The only person at the time, that I could think of, was my friend just finishing her IT studies on BU. I know she had some experience in web development, and guys from Beohemija asked for junior level position, so I’ve submitted her CV and my recommendation to them.

We didn’t even think that she will be accepted, she didn’t finish

the studies yet, and she has pretty small portfolio, but we surely didn’t expect the answer we got in the end. The answer was “Sorry, but we do not need a female candidate for this position at this time.” . And that was not all, they even asked me if I happen to know some male candidates after all.

Well, dear gentlemen from Beohemija, NO, I do not know any male candidates, and even if I did know some, I wouldn’t recommend them to work in your company.

Maybe, some day, I will recommend your company, but only when you answer this question “Why is it important for a web developer position, if candidate is male or female ?”

You have comments open on this page, go for it, answer it.

Since I have a pretty large number of clients based in UK, this is something that I’m facing on almost every project. I don’t know how my clients are forced to buy the Fasthost.co.uk hosting in the first place, but it seems that Fasthost have pretty aggressive marketing campaign, so they are all tempted to join with them.

Because I can’t really waste any more of my time answering questions like “Why do I have to move my hosting away from Fasthost ?”, I’ve decided to write this article and to include some relevant links to similar articles with explanations and testimonials about Fasthost hosting service.

My point of view

Well, first thing, they are basically Windows hosting provider, you can see that even on their front page, Fasthost dot co dot uk, which looks like it was made with FrontPage by some 13 your old kid.

.htaccess files don’t work

You have to install PHPMyAdmin by your self, so no CPanel

If your site needs to send email to the email address that is also hosted on Fasthost, it won’t work, not even if you use SMTP.

They do have Linux hosting, and even PHP5 support, but their Linux hosting is done with bad load balancing and it is producing the great number of 500 errors.

php.ini files don’t work

You must use their build in password protection generator page to be able to add simple .htaccess password protections on folders.

They allow SSH access but you can’t do anything with it, except simple cd, chmod, ls,…. So no mysql importing/exporting, no rsync, totally useless.

Other resources on same subject

• * Fasthosts timewasters by Andy Merrett
• * Fasthosts Hell
• * Fasthost website hosting review
• * http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=789978

So, I hope that after reading all these opinions, you will run away from Fasthost ASAP.
In short, if you need PHP developer, you don’t need Fasthost hosting package.

Fell free to comment bellow.

This is the great class that I wrote for Article Creator Tool application. The class is pretty simple, based on “finite state machine” logic, but it is very powerful.

Demo

The key idea behind this was born in Lyndon Wright mind, my client from 2buy1click Ltd, who is working mainly in internet marketing field. He needed the fast way to create lot of similar, but yet unique articles for his SEO campaigns. Articles need to be unique for Google, but they also need to all target keywords from the same SEO campaign. I’m talking here about 1000-2000 articles.

He was using other online tools for this, that was not so perfect and were pretty expensive, so we decided to build our own tool.

The idea was to enable article writers to write just few articles (1-3), to be able to add variation definitions in those articles text, so application can choose random variation from given definitions each time it run. We also wanted to be able to add tokens in those articles, that will relate to CSV file columns, and application will replace those tokens with correct field from passed in CSV file.

So, the resulting requirements for the base class are these:

• ** Spinner syntax will be defined with these parts {variation1|variation1|variation1}
• ** The spinner syntax can be places anywhere in the passed in text
• ** The spinner syntax can be nested in unlimited level
• ** When application finds the spinner syntax part it will choose the random variation to display.
• ** Spinner syntax can contain CSV file references, defined with tokens like this {db:NN:}, where NN is CSV column number
• ** This needs to be very flexible in use, so even if article writer make some errors in his article text, the class must return the error, and stop the execution to protect the server from infinite loop. Did I mention that the whole thing will work on shared hosting server.
• ** Must be fast in execution.

So, here’s the example of spinner text:

The {sample|example} spinner {article|text} that will be passed to this spinner class for 
processing. The text can contain CSV file {references|tokens} like this <a href="{db:2:}">
{db:1:}</a> . The spinner syntax parts can be nested like this {var1|var2|{var3|var4}}.
Nesting can be unlimited in depth.

The one possible result of this text would be this:

The sample spinner text that will be passed to this spinner class for processing.
The text can contain CSV file tokens like this <a href="http://www.csvlink.com">csv keyword</a> .
The spinner syntax parts can be nested like this var3. Nesting can be unlimited in depth.

Visit the demo page, try out the demo form, and I hope that you will find this class useful for your own needs.
If you have any suggestions or questions, please fell free to submit the comment. I’ll try to respond ASAP.

I don’t like to talk too much, so I’m just going to list all things that I think I’m pretty familiar with. Luckily, you won’t see this post so often, and I promise to change it from time to time.

• * Server Side
  • ** PHP Programming
  • ** MySQL Databases
  • ** Shell scripting
  • ** Python ( pure basics )
  • ** Making it all run on auto-pilot
• * Client Side
  • ** XHTML
  • ** CSS
  • ** JavaScript ( Mootools mostly )
  • ** XML
  • ** Flash ( pretty little )
  • ** ActionScript ( wannabe )
• * Internet Marketing
  • ** Keyword Research
  • ** SEO ( I guess that could go in the Server Side too )
  • ** Article writting ( I don’t write, but I do spin them )
• * After Service Maintenance ( generally I won’t be the one who will do this, but I’ll be happy to find the right person for the job )
  • ** Shopping Carts maintenance
  • ** Wordpress based website maintenance
  • ** Automated Backups ( this is something that comes built in in any website I make, if web server will allow it )