Welcome to the Jungle, teddy.antesonic.org!
The McCalip IT infrastructure will be going through some transition time over the next month or two, as ownership of the gilford.textdrive.com server space will pass in its entirety to Dadio and I am taking over my newly-minted VPS (Virtual Private Server) with linode.com.
I was planning this transition during my internship with Shell Pipeline (Summer 2005), but opted for TextDrive because I was chicken and cheap. But, for a small incremental per month, I get the full flexibility of root access to a server on a fixed IP with a “ph4t p1p3” as the kiddies say.
Plus, I now have the added benefit of knowing what I’m doing before I jump into full responsibility.
I loaded the newly-released Debian Lenny (timing a server build on a Debian —stable release is nothing short of serendipitous on its own) and in minutes had something I could log into.
I rolled on Python and Subversion (for the MUD), lighttpd, PHP-FastCGI, and Django. I got PHP linked up with lightty via FastCGI with prefab Debian scripts, got the phpinfo() test screen to load up, and started to feel really dirty, like I had messed something up.
I then blindly proceeded to load Serendipity, an up-and-coming hip blog engine. It was too heavy to really grab my affection. Textpattern has served me well, but I’m frankly tired of the way it works. But, it’s so close to perfect for me (at least the subset of it that I use), it’s hard to put a finger on why I dislike it at all.
Ah, I got it. It’s written in PHP.
I like PHP, I really do. But, this is my first root on a public IP, and the last thing I want to do is run the de facto shared hosting compromise. I want to try something elaborate and fun.
So, I’m about to sketch in a web.py blog engine and go to 100% Python via FastCGI. I would glady start from scratch on the server to do this (building back will only require fifteen minutes of work anyway). I don’t even need to reformat to do this, but I would feel better to keep it clean before I get all the files loaded up.
So, I can write a rapidly-prototyped blog engine in web.py probably in an evening or two of light work, use sqlite instead of a standalone database, and finally be able to back up my blog with a straight file copy. This would be very nice to have.
I’ll be using MoinMoin as a wiki (I maintain a near-empty wiki just for static pages like Christmas lists and how-to documents).
Cluster will be ported away from its ad hoc filthy PHP (I wrote Cluster 1.0 in a half day over SSH from work) and into Python. This will probably take less than an hour once Python is in play. I think Cluster’s bugs right now are due to magic quoting, which is just the most perfect example of why I’m wanting to get rid of PHP.
I’m also tired of Textile as a formatting language, as much as I’ve liked it in the past, so it’s time for something else on both the blog and Cluster front.
So, unless I have the server down for the re-do tonight, you can check out http://teddy.antesonic.org to see a beautiful empty file listing.