Here’s a quick unsolicited endorsement for PressHarbor, the WordPress hosting company where my blogs The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century and Global Nerdy live. They didn’t ask me to plug them or even know that I’m doing so.

PressHarbor rocks! Yesterday, an entry of mine from back in May – Bacon Pancakes – got 20,000 pageviews and as of 9:30 this morning it’s already up to 15,000. Another article of mine, New Programming Jargon, amassed over 80,000 pageviews in a single day. The servers at most hosting companies catering to individuals would’ve keeled over under the bandwidth stresses that my blogs put on them, but PressHarbor’s have kept on ticking though mass visits brought on by Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Twitter or any other “Dude, check this out!” kind of web service.

If you’re looking for kick-ass seven-kinds-of-awesome WordPress hosting, I highly recommend PressHarbor.

A ThirdAge/JWT Boom study has data that suggests that “people over age 40 participate heavily in word-of-mouth and value personal recommendations and expert opinions, but they have not embraced social networking or blogs despite being heavy users of other online services.”

I’ve been quite impressed by the “Addison-Wesley Professional Ruby” series of books (I’ve got The Ruby Way and RailsSpace) as well as the work of series editor Obie Fernandez, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at RailsConf 2006. That — along with glowing reviews for both books plus my serious immersion into Ruby and Rails at TSOT — is why I’ve got Design Patterns in Ruby and The Rails Way on order. I’m looking forward to getting my paws on these books, and I’ll post reviews shortly afterwards.

(I’m normally pretty conservative when it comes to spending on computer programming books for the past little while, but that’s because evangelism rather than programming has paid the rent. That situation has changed somewhat.)

Both Design Patterns in Ruby and The Rails Way are in Antonio Cangiano’s set of recommended Ruby and Rails books. If you’re looking to get into either Ruby or Rails (or if you’re already into either and just looking for related reading material), check out his list.