Posts Tagged: web development


26
Mar 09

New Web Host

This afternoon I took the plunge and transfered my website from BlueHost to Webfaction. There are two main reasons for this switch. First of all, I’ve been learning website programming with Python and the Django framework. My previous host does not support Django, and it seems Webfaction is the most popular host among Django geeks. Also, BlueHost does seem to oversell a litle too much, while I’ve heard good things about Webfaction in that regard. There is one good thing that I’ll say about Bluehost though, which is that their tech support is friendly and very fast.

This afternoon I purchased my Webfaction account, then made a dump of my MySql DB for WordPress, created a tarball of the WordPress site files, then downloaded both to my laptop. Webfaction supports full shell/SSH goodness, so I then SCP’d both files to the server. I had a bit of trouble with importing my MySql dump into a new database, so within minutes of submitting a support ticket, I recieved a responce containing two SED lines to fix the problem. A few minutes latter I was up and running.

30 minutes ago I pointed my domain name to the new servers, and I am waiting for the settings to propagate to DNS servers world wide. Meanwhile, Webfaction does not provide DNS hosting, so I purchased a Network Solutions account, and am waiting for crashsystems.net to transfer there. Once that happens, I’ll finally be able to create my own bloody cname records (DNS tunnel FTW!).


14
Jul 08

WordPress 2.6 released a month early!

I’m both surprised and exited to see that WordPress 2.6 has been released almost a month ahead of time. By far the feature I’m most exited about is post revisions, which gives WP content wiki like revision history. This should be very useful for multi-author blogs and sites. Another interesting feature is integrating Google Gears into the admin interface, which results in faster page loading.

One thing that should be interesting to see is how many plugins will need to be updated to run on 2.6, and how long this update will take. I’ll probably upgrade tomorrow, but I hope this doesn’t break compatibility with my beloved plugins!