ThinkGeek Adventure Gaming Dice, brushed steel.
Yup. Part of it was my dissatisfaction with Drupal as a straight-up blogging platform (versus WordPress’s specialization as one), and part of it is the vast improvements made by WordPress in the area of photo uploading and management. That part will still take some playing with to get figured out, but at least I’ll be able to upload more than one photo at a time. I still need to find or write WordPress versions for a couple of Drupal modules I had come to find invaluable, but that’ll get done in time.
I am still migrating posts over from the old Drupal site (which is available here for the time being), but it seems to be going smoothly. In the meantime, proceed to the next post and enjoy some photos of my “new” dice set (which I’ve had for a while, but need to move the photos of over here anyway).
I was having weird problems with Firefox lagging every once in a while, so I decided to just build my own for Mac OS X Leopard on my Intel Core 2 Duo Mac Pro. Didn’t turn out to be too difficult; Neil Lee at BeatnikPad already has Intel and G5 native builds of Firefox 3 available, but I like having the default branding (Firefox instead of Minefield, the fox icon instead of the weird bomb-planet thing) and a little more customized optimization. Here’s a basic walkthrough of how I did it; you’ll need the latest version of Xcode installed, a passing familiarity with the Terminal, and the latest version of libIDL (if you have Fink, fink install libidl2; for MacPorts, sudo port install libidl).
Like I mentioned previously, this site is now being served up by lighttpd; it took a while to get clean URLs working right, but what right now is making my server tick is a very carefully laid-out filesystem and set of bash scripts and lighty config files, wrapped around a Drupal multisite installation to make installing modules and upgrading the entire system as intuitive and painless as possible. Upgrading Drupal (from 6.2 to the brand-new 6.3 for example) takes no more than running a single command. Here’s an overview of how my own site is set up, generalized to make it applicable to almost any other system.
Continue reading ‘Drupal multisite, clean URLs and lighttpd’
Still not on any better of a schedule. Not really worth discussing.
The site is now running on lighttpd, to cut back on the memory consumption compared to Apache. It took a while to get all the rewrite rules working right, but it seems to all be working now; use the contact form (returning soon) to let me know if something isn’t right.
And between finishing up my summer class (”Philosophy of Science”) and working on this site and the one for work, I’m just about completely settled into a new condo with one of my suitemates from last year and a friend of his who I got to know over the course of the year. It’s a nice place, about a mile from campus and cheap enough for us to afford digital cable and epic-fast cable internet in addition to food, electricity and rent. No real gripes aside from the dishwasher apparently being broken; I’m still working on getting everything unpacked and set up, but I like it so far. I don’t have any photos online here yet (they’re on Facebook for the time being) but as soon as I have a way to upload photos straight here from iPhoto I’ll post them.
Really not a whole lot else to write about. Maybe a couple more tech how-tos coming up soon, but not tonight. I think I actually want to be awake for most of the day tomorrow.
My web site is now (mostly, anyway) migrated to my new server package, which as previously mentioned is a NetworkRedux Silver Virtual Private Server, paid for yearly (yeesh). Additionally, all of my domain names are now with GoDaddy, and I’m hosting my own BIND and nameservers—meaning, no dealing with NetworkRedux or having to go through a slow and buggy server control panel which shall go unnamed to create subdomains or make other DNS configurations. I am now in complete control of my web server and all online access to it, and am managing it all by hand (primarily via SSH through the command line).
It did take a little longer than I had anticipated to get things put back together to their current state. I went through a couple of minor configuration crises that I did manage to resolve eventually, and just when I thouht I had everything put together—Drupal up and running and everything—I managed to bork it all again. But my perserverance and late nights have paid off, and tada: the site is back online. Two posts still have yet to be migrated over: one because I’m considering how to attack formatting the large blocks of code it contains, and another because I’ll be rewriting it to include lots of images, which is dependent on the subject in the next paragraph. Any old links (except those to the two aforementioned posts) should still work fine thanks to a little mod_rewrite magic, and the RSS feed is still in the same place as before, so no need to update any old links; it’s all taken care of.
Continue reading ‘BIND, Drupal, and sleep patterns (or lack thereof)’
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