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).

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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.

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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.

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