Ides of March (2008) Update
My last post on this blag was on February 21st, about my new VPS hosting. While I am happy to report that I am still happy with them, I am dismayed at my lack of inspiration for updating here. Granted there are only a few people who read here - and perhaps none anymore - I am to be excused, but I have always found writing for the sake of writing to be therapeutic, and I am in need of therapy.
So, rather than make one big update, here's a bunch of little ones. If you squint your eyes, it sort of looks like one big post.
1) New Jeep - on Presidents Day I went out and leased (ick) a 2008 Jeep Wrangler Rubicon Unlimited. This is the first vehicle I have ever owned that has four nouns to describe it. In keeping with my theme of buying obnoxiously yellow Wranglers, this one is "Detonator Yellow." Why did I buy it? Because my old Grand Cherokee needed a lot of work, and given that my ability to collect a paycheck hinges on my 5h round trip commute, I need a reliable car.
The new Jeep.
The Grand Cherokee I traded in. I also called it "vehicle of impending doom." At least it looked good.
My much older 2004 Wrangler Rubicon, in "Solar Yellow."
It's a very nice Jeep. I don't think it's as good off-road as the '04 Rubicon I had, but it's far more comfortable on-road. I recently bought the MyGig navigation radio off eBay, which adds navigation as well as a 20GB hard drive for storing mp3's. This has cut down on my use of my iPhone as my primary music device (and my poor 30gb iPod video sits uncharged and unloved now.) So, now I'm car poor again. :/
2) VMWare Servers: I'm pretty amazed with the number of hits and comments to my VMWare Server blag. Thankfully it seems nobody is coming here for information on HPUX, which is relieving. Or, it could be that I'm the only person left in the world that has to use it. We're adding another 10 VMWare Servers to the mix. I've made up a nice kickstart to install CentOS 4.6, VMWare Server, VMWare MUI, and install the Dell OpenManage yum repository on the box. I'll probably post that soon.
3) Datacenter Migration: About two years ago we moved a bunch of gear from a colo to our new corporate headquarters. We built a (roughly) 25x25' room in which to store all of our server gear. We left a 1/2 rack at the colo to hold our DNS server and some other odds and ends, because we had a good deal on it. Fast forward a year -- the new server room is full, is drawing close to 200a of power, the a/c is tragically overutilized, one of our portable a/c units committed suicide, and the 1/2 rack at the colo has bloomed to a full rack of gear that is largely powered off. Since the old colo is out of space (and apparently getting out of the colo business anyway) we're moving to a new colo in Manhattan. This is a process that has been in the works for almost four months now, held up by ceaceless negotiations, a director level position above me being created, then the guy who filled it got fired, then we hired someone else, problems with leasing companies, arguments with how to transport gear to the new place, etc. Is it any wonder why I am jealous of the perl programmers we have now?
4) Philosophy: My new boss and I have some differing views of how the world and business works. It's a friendly disagreement. He lent me some Ayn Rand to read this weekend. I've heard plenty about her, but never got around to reading any yet. I'm sure I'll disagree. There's talk about starting an office book club. I think my first contribution to that will be some Hermann Hesse. That'll show 'em. (Note: after I finish Ayn Rand I'm going to start rereading some Hesse, perhaps in chronological order.)
5) RIP Julius Caesar: He got stabbed today, 2052 years ago.
WordPress as a CMS
I love WordPress. I've worked with a bunch of web apps over the years, and nothing comes close to WordPress for ease of use and cleanliness of design.
My other website, NJPineBarrens.com, uses a bunch of different web apps to run. Joomla for the content management (articles and file downloads), vBulletin for discussion forums, and PhotoPost PHP Pro for image galleries. Ranked in order of happiness, vBulletin is the best, followed by Joomla, then followed distantly by PhotoPost.
I've been interested in replacing Joomla for a while. The WYSIWYG editor isn't all that hot, adding weird tags when I don't want them. Article management gets unwieldy when you have a lot of content. There's a ton of hard coded CSS that's impossible to track down. It's also pretty slow. That's not to say I don't like Joomla -- I do. It's probably the best open source CMS out there (sorry, Drupal folks.) I've been blogging with WordPress for a while, and saw that other people were turning it into a CMS platform.
I had some requirements. First, if I was going to use WordPress, I didn't want to have to hack any core files to get functionality that I wanted. I was going to limit myself to using plugins and a custom theme. Secondly, I wanted to limit the number of plugins I would need in the interest of speed. Lastly, I didn't want to really lose any functionality that I already had with Joomla.
You can take a look at WordPress as a CMS here. You can see the original Joomla powered site here.
Rather than start with a 3rd party skin, I modified the default Kubrick theme to my needs. For category lists, I changed the code to only display post titles and author metadata. Other guides seem to want to point people towards getting rid of timestamps. For my purposes, I don't really mind them being displayed. For older articles that I have reprinted (from the 1930's) it's funny to see the create date set so far back. Speaking of, I got rid of the box in the sidebar that shows the d/m/y archives.
I got my design together, and spent the bulk of the day loading my content (by hand!) in. When I was done, my front page (index.php) was a mess. Worse of all, things show up on the front page in chronological order. That's not good at all - I often take old content and "re-feature" it in Joomla. (By checking 'show on homepage') I found a plugin to take care of this - Opt In Front Page - by Denis de Bernardy. This lets me create a new category (Blog) with a post slug of "blog." His plugin makes WordPress only show articles that are in the Blog category on the front page. Best part is, you can rename the category as long as you keep the slug the same. So blog became "featured" on my site. I then changed index.php to show the full text of the article -- I'm going to limit my front page to only one article at a time. You can, however, have more and if you're worried about size just change the_content to the_excerpt to just show post excerpts. I loaded the WP-Cats plugin for faster/better mass category management.
One of the plugins I use for Joomla is JCE - it's made adding images to my articles, and formatting them, a breeze. The defaut WordPress image upload feature is okay, but sucks for formatting. I noticed a lot of people had problems wrapping text around the image. Well, the Kubrick theme and the TinyMCE Advanced plugin addresses this. Add your image, send the image or the thumb to the editor, and then click on the image in the editor. Click on the image icon in the editor, and then click on the appearance tab. Select the "alignleft" or "alignright" class in the dropdown. Volia, your text should wrap around the image when you apply the changes. For fun I also installed the Slightbox plugin for some eye candy when people click on thumbnails. My one complaint about it is that it doesn't scale down images that are too large for the screen. I may look for an alternative.
Finally, the file downloads on my site needed to come over. There aren't many download managers for WordPress. The best I could find is wp-publications-archive. It's not great, but it gets the job done. Make sure you manually create your icons directory, or file type icons you upload won't work. You'll also need to add some CSS to your stylesheet - you can find it on the plugin's Wiki page (and stupidly, not the readme.) The plugin sucks, for the most part, but it does the job. Fortunately media downloads are not a large part of my site.
The last thing I wanted was the ability to have links to the subdomains for the site - the forums, the gallery, etc. in my sidebar - ideally with my pages. The Page Links To plugin does the trick. You create a new blank page, and add a custom field containing the URL that you want to redirect to. When you create your page links, make sure to uncheck "allow comments" and "allow pings" otherwise your page won't save - and will show up as a draft post. You may also want to re-order your pages.
I also took a look at integrating vBulletin for article comments. I found a plugin on vBulletin.org, but it required the blog and the forums to live in the same subdomain, which mine doesn't. I tried it quickly and it didn't work, so I'm stuck with WordPress's commenting engine. Of course that meant that I had to enable Akismet.
This is just a very high level overview of what you need to do to turn WordPress into a rudimentary CMS. I have 90% of the functionality that Joomla gave me, but I feel like things are much more in control with presentation and article management. It's still a work in progress, but after my users beta test it for a while, I'll be rolling it out to production.
Blog Started Anew
I decided to restart the blog. It seems to be the new thing to do, since all of my co-workers now seem to have them.
I originally wanted to write a tech blog, and perhaps some of my posts will be tech related, but for now I think it will be mostly personal.