Posts Tagged ‘Blog System’

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post.

Well not quite. It’s the first post via WordPress for me. I’m not quite done migrating crap over and certainly haven’t picked a decent theme yet. There are just way way too many to pick from and sadly there’s no way to easily spot those that work with 2.7 so it’s been trial and error for me. I think ultimately I’ll just end up designing and creating my own theme. For now though this will do.

This will be short and sweet since it’s time to go outside and play in the snow . Please update your RSS feeds to point to http://feeds.coreygo.com/coreygo, I’ll be setting a 301 redirect there shortly.

Yay, WordPress FTW.

I’m currently in the process of migrating from self-hosted dasBlog to a self-hosted WordPress site. I did set up a WordPress.com hosted blog but decided I wasn’t ready to give up as much control as I have grown accustomed to. I won’t say it’s been easy and it’s certainly not been a famous 5 minute installation. Maybe if I were already running PHP and mySQL, but certainly not with a clean install of Server 2008 and IIS7. Which I guess is one of the big reasons I used dasBlog for so long. It was simple and didn’t even need a database. Sadly dasBlog just doesn’t have as much going on as for as community contributions, updates, plugins, support, you name it. I was going to give Community Server a go but after a couples days with it I realized it was overkill.

So yep, I’m now going to use Server 2008, IIS7, FastCGI with PHP, and mySQL. Hey, at least it’s not LAMP, doubt it will ever be unless I stop hosting.

I do have the blog running and it’s great. But I did hit a few snags and found a bunch of resources that really helped. If I do everything right it should end up being seamless. URL Rewritting should hopefully have permalinks working fine along with existing RSS feeds and all that junk. We’ll see. I’m finally getting around to dumping all my domains and moving everything to coreygo.com so feel free to head there now and subscribe there if you want.

Here’s the list of pages I used to get me going:

• Installing WordPress
  http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress
• Installing Multiple Blogs (just in case I need to)
  http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_Multiple_Blogs
  http://wordpress.org/support/topic/174688
• WordPress on IIS
  http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/280/wordpress-on-iis/
• Setting Up a Database for a PHP Application on IIS
  http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/300/setting-up-a-database-for-a-php-application-on-iis/
• Enabling Pretty Permalinks when hosting WordPress on IIS7
  http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/466/enabling-pretty-permalinks-in-wordpress/
• Using FastCGI to Host PHP Applications on IIS 7.0
  http://learn.iis.net/page.aspx/246/using-fastcgi-to-host-php-applications-on-iis-70/
• Remember to set the PHP registry settings if you extract PHP from the ZIP
  http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/tutorials/windows2008-iis7-fastcgi-php.html

• Solved my 503 Service Unavailable issues by making sure to set this registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\PHP\IniFilePath = C:\PHP

Other than that normal troubleshooting and a lot more than 5 minutes. I also grabbed a bunch of plugins and a bunch of different themes to try out but that’s for another post. I am going to try the NextGen gallery plugin since it does EXIF and RSS but I need to make sure it’ll support just feeding it a directory of images for bulk additions. Oh and finally I need to update all my bloody categories since they’re lame. Plus finally 100 other things that I’m sure I’m forgetting.

That’s all for now, see you via WordPress shortly.

So my thought process behind getting rid of Exchange for a much simpler Hotmail or Gmail solution has got me thinking about simplification in general. I’ve been giving serious thought to dumping other complicated solutions for much mor elegant ones. For example no longer running my Server 2008 box in a domain, dumping all the services on the server and just hosting my blog and photo gallery in the cloud. In the end the server would just be a glorified file server.

Somehow though I can’t bring myself to do this, I think it’s got something to do with the feeling of control. Right now I can do whatever I want to the server or to any of the data. If I want to have my gallery full of 20K 8MP images I can, if I want to stream all my music I can. If I were to switch to Wordpress and Flickr I’d lose all that control.

I also find it amusing that while I want to just simplify things I’m also considering doing crap that’s just the opposite. I’m tempted to switch from dasBlog to Community Server. I’m also thinking that if Apple announces Core 2 Quad’s in the iMac’s or MacBook’s this month that I’ll likely buy one and run Vista on it.

I’m tired of buying Dell’s, they’re just boring and work , plus I wouldn’t mind trying out OSX even if it’s only for a few hours. I have considered just getting a new E series Latitude but meh, I’m not a fan of any of the Dell desktops either, they’re cheap and quiet sure, but they just lack a certain something. Thinking about things a bit further, I’m kind of tired of using a laptop as my main machine. My neck is killing me from always sitting on the couch and typing away. On the other hand a laptop fits what I need really well. I guess I just need to get a small desk with a dock along with a real monitor and keyboard and mouse.

Who knows, things really aren’t that complicated, everything I’ve got going on now just sort of takes care of itself and I don’t do anything. When something does break though it is a pain. Would be nice if that wasn’t the case.

I think I’m going to try and install Community Server now on coreygo.com get that running and migrate things over. Not sure what I’ll do for redirection of this old site and how to migrate the data plus the RSS feed. Yay for complications.

Getting tired of getting trackback spam so I’ve disabled the service for now. Will investigate options. At the same time I just got back from my vacation with 1989 pieces of SPAM, Exchange/Outlook filtered 1008 into the Junk Email folder and looks like the Exchange server bounced back another 3984 messages to spammers. My problem though is that there was another 981 messages that came from the System Administrator account saying “The following recipient(s) could not be reached:”, trying to resolve that as well. Not to mention some late spring cleaning.

I created a nice little task for myself this week and figured I’d start early. I expect some more changes and updates soon but for the time being I’ve switched to a new theme. It’s basically just the Essence theme created by Jelle Druyts for dasBlog. I’ve modified it quite a bit, swapping the text sides, making the body wider, fixing a minor bug with the columns stacking when in windowed mode, and I popped in a header image. Picking an image was quite hard since there’s only 100px in height to work with, etc. I’ll most likely change it out over time. For those that read in a RSS reader it won’t mean any difference. I just had to do it since I got sick of seeing the same thing when I went to manage the blog here. I also added the GeoURL info to the metadata as well. More changes soon.