I’ve long been a DreamHost customer and I’ve generally had good service with them. Granted, it’s a basic shared account so the resources are a bit constrained, but I have to say that having seen other control panels I can state that DreamHost is really easy to use. Not only that, but its 1-click installs system is brilliant. I’ve had this blog up for quite a while now (not that I use it much) and its WordPress version was just getting old. I was going to go through the pain of manually upgrading it all when I saw that there’s actually an option in the DreamHost Goodies panel to do 1-click upgrades. And, guess what? Yep: painless upgrades. That’s so freakin’ fantastic like you cannot believe.

The second thing to mention is a static site generator that leverages Haml+Sass: Staticmatic. That’s amazing. It’s a simple concept really: set up your source files, allow partial templates, and use the popular HTML markup generator and its trusty CSS sidekick Sass. Getting the software was just merely the installation of a gem. And there’s a handy preview utility that fires up a Webrick instance so you can code in a kind of almost-realtime way. Then where you’re ready to publish, just run the command: staticmatic build <yourproject>. Easy peasy.