Old news from April, 2008

Yeah, I work in Tech Support

Monday, 28/04/2008 ≅08:39 ©cat

Which is only part of the reason this is so funny. The rest of the reason is that this is soooo totally me... "It was working fine until you broke it? >click<" hehehe.

Life is too short for man pages, and occasionally much too short without them.

 

Shamelessly embedded from the fine mind at xkcd.com

Monday morning blah

Monday, 28/04/2008 ≅08:30 ©cat

It's monday, and I'm back at work. Training isn't so bad, except for the glacial pace. This is the first chance I've had to see the site on IE. It looks better on firefox, though it remains to be seen if that's a function of display settings. All the features seem to work ok, except for the known bugs. Hopefully I'll have the production site up and running while I wait for my wife to get off work, then I can start beating this site into shape.

TODO:

  1. Get www up and running
  2. install some plugins? Need to find an expert list of the must-have plugins.
  3. Create my own theme.
  4. Install gallery and gallery plugins. Upload pics.
  5. Start working on some real projects.

Development site is running

Sunday, 27/04/2008 ≅23:39 ©cat

I am posting this on the a.dev.brainycat.com site I got running. In order to do development on wordpress without fear of breaking something useful, I had to change the user that some of the files were hosted under, which broke the live site. That's ok. I also had to backup the db from the live site and copy it to a new db that I setup. Some of the dev work will include new tables and such, so I don't want to jeapordize the live db.

I also had a little bit of an issue with the database. Dreamhost's installer configures a random string in the /wp-config.php:$table_prefix variable. When I went through the installer, I pointed the a.dev installation at the same database, but none of the data came up. Bummer. A quick peek with phpMyAdmin and the problem was obvious. I configured the dev site with the same table prefix, and my site came up without a hitch. Damn I'm good!  I'm debating how often I need to sync the two dbs. I need to think through the logic, and if I'd be creating more problems than save time. I need to develop an offsite backup system, as well. I had another issue with passwords; when I installed to the dev site wordpress pointed me to the login and admin pword generation site. I could not get logged in, so I just reset the pword via phpMyAdmin and life was grand.

Now I really need to get on board the subversion bus and get this site into a repo, so I can push the live site.  I'll probably have some time tomorrow at work to go over the SVN commands. Firstly, I need to find the url svn url ;).

I'm really excited about this. I was recently shown what one can do with google's tracking utilities. I'll have to setup YAGA (Yet Another Google Account) and get one of the keys and whatnot.

With all these new pwords, I'm going to look for a spreadsheet app that runs under linux. M$ compatibility is nice, but everything I'd need to import I can export from M$ as a CSV.

Things are moving along nicely. At this rate, I should be able to work on some real projects within a couple of weeks. Let's see how long it takes to beat wordpress into shape.

TODO items:

  1. find spreadsheet app for linux
  2. determine SVN URL
  3. import dev site to repo, publish to production site
  4. offsite db backup

Some notes about Subversion

Sunday, 27/04/2008 ≅11:35 ©cat

Dreamhosts info

Using subversion for web development

Turtle Book

Chardonnay and the TinyMCE’s handling of IMG

Sunday, 27/04/2008 ≅00:08 ©cat

I just really want to see what posted pix look like. I'm also sensing that I'll get email updates working before much happens with SVN. Somehow, a bottle of chardonnay became procured while returning from a venture to purchase subversion documentation. Thus, a pic:

Ferrari and Formula One: It's almost enough to make a guy believe in god

Documentation Depository

Saturday, 26/04/2008 ≅23:42 ©cat

I setup a subdomain I'm calling rtfm, at which I'll be uploading documentation packages for whatever strikes my fancy. Eventually, I could get good at LaTex and generate atomically integrated documentation from the source, but this isn't that day. So I'll just be uploading my own mirrors of whatever I need. Currently, I only have one resource uploaded. The Turtle Book will be the source of most of my traffic for the next couple of days while I learn the system.

Favorite themes

Saturday, 26/04/2008 ≅19:30 ©admin

Note to self:

  • ICE 1.0
  • Blandy 1.0

Are the best templates, but neither are widget aware. Which is ok, because the widget aware themes don't want to play nice with the plugins. So we're back to the part where I need to get SVN setup. Which is new for me. I've used a couple of different SCM packages, and even scripted against one of them, but this is all new software for me. Hooray. My spidey sense pictures a trip to MegaBookLifestyleStore to procure one.

Check the easy two off…

Saturday, 26/04/2008 ≅18:22 ©admin

8 themes and many plugins are installed, now I need to do some real sysadminning and get SVN on board.

First Post

Saturday, 26/04/2008 ≅18:14 ©cat

Lots to do before this is really ready for presentation:

  1. setup trunk in svn
  2. install plugins, configure
  3. find better theme template (but this is the fun part so it will probably get done first)
  4. build theme
  5. work on some real projects