Yan Huang @ Renderhosting

Yesterday, I attended the 5th LA Web Application Developers Meetup, as a presenter. This time it was hosted by Demand Media in Santa Monica–parking was great this time and they offered free pizza, soft drinks and beer.

Mark Politi, VP of Marketing from Planetwide Media, presented first on their online comic strip creator software. ComicStrip Character Creator is the name of it. Now what I like most about his online editor is that it is all built in Ajax so you don’t need any external software–not even Adobe Flash player! This is the online version of a desktop software that they have–it is also mashed up with the Google Images and Photobucket API. There are a few [x] images when you ue Google Images and slight pixelation but, overall, it is a really neat tool!

Instructions to play with it yourself:
Go to HyperComics.com, sign up for a free account. Once inside, click on Comic Strip and Character Creator.

Yan Huang (which is me from Renderhosting) presented next on all the little tricks and secrets that goes on in the shared web hosting world. I was one of those Myth Buster guys, busting down all the dirty schemes that shared web hosting companies played on their customers. Check our my PowerPoint presentation–I hope you find it useful, if not, entertaining. Also check out Renderhosting.net if you ever need shared hosting without as much BS as the other shared hosts!

Ben Alavi presented next on databases. I’m n00b compared to him when it comes to databases so I don’t have much to comment on. I found his blog at http://www.benalavi.com so check that out and you can download his presentation here. Maybe if you are a DBA or someone that works with databases a lot, you could take advantage of that link.

Tom Dean, Solutions Architect from Demand Media, gave his presentation on Memcached. In the 1st LA Web Application Developer’s meetup, there was a presentation on Memcached but Tom really nailed it with his! If you want to use memached, here is the Official Memached website. LiveJournal, Facebook, and a lot of other large sites use it so it’s pretty much proven to work. Tom’s company is also hiring developers (PHP and .NET I believe?) so if you need a job, you can check them out at their office at 1333 2nd Street, Santa Monica, CA 90401 or at their careers page–it is right next to Santa Monica beach so great location to work in!

Last night was a great meetup! Thank you Will Jessup (check out Kevo!) for organizing it and thank you Demand Media for hosting it!!

We got the Renderhosting.net blog up! I will keep you guys up to date on what’s going on in the hosting world and keep you keyed in on the latest technologies out there!