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