W
e just moved to the Eastbank Commerce Center, on Water ave, and even though we can almost see our old office across the river, as far as food options go, it’s like we’ve moved to another city fifty years ago. From the previous office, we were right around the block from a slew of food carts. (Oh how we miss you Sonny Bowl) There were also tons of other vegan / gluten free options within easy walking distance.
I’
ve discovered why the east bank is referred to as the “industrial” district. It’s clearly a reference to the size of the deep fryers at the brew pubs littering the area. Imagine going from 6 great vegan options at one food cart, to 6 options within a couple blocks, and three of those are actually deep fried. And really, can you even count a side of tots as an option?
There is ho
pe though, veganism appears to be sprouting and sending out gluten free shoots in the area. A Kure juicing company has opened across the street, and I discovered Cookies Cupcakes and more, which opened a few weeks ago under the hawthorne bridge. The more includes a fairly robust menu of vegetarian options. and if you get at least 3 flavors of cupcakes, that makes a complete meal, right?
The next best option is to pay a hosting company, such as Godaddy, to host the site for you. They operate the server, usually in a large data center, where there are very fast connections available. This leads to an acceptable level of performance, but these discount hosting companies have to pack many sites onto each server to turn a profit. All those sites competing for processing power leads to sluggish response times.
Currently, we host our staging and production West Coast websites from a California data center. We back both up daily to two separate servers, in addition to copies on our local development machines. That way, if Mt Hood erupts, and Portland turns into Pompeii II, you’re site would happily keep on running. Or if the “Big One” hits, and California slides off into the Pacific, we’d still be able to fire up a new server and restore your site in less than an hour. But let’s hope neither happens.
You may not have noticed, since we’ve been having such great weather this year, but spring is officially here! One of the advantages of living in Portland is the close proximity of rural areas. There are a lot of great places to visit in the spring, one of which is the Tulip Festival. Located in Woodburn, just 30 minutes south of Portland, 
Everyone has heard the old yarn about the cobbler whose own children are left barefoot. We can relate to that poor overworked cobbler, as we’ve been making do with a very basic website here at Modern Interface for far too long.