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I had intended to host this blog myself.  It’s supposed to be part of my online toolbox of software installation and administration.  I want to be able to eat my own dogfood, despite the very good advice that blogging should be outsourced (via daringfireball).  Incidentally, the same situation applies to email: best outsourced, but I want to eat my own dogfood.

So first I had to decide on a blogging platform to install.  I didn’t care too much, so I looked for the most popular one.  It’s pretty clear that that’s WordPress.

Then it was as simple as a sudo apt-get install wordpress on Ubuntu, and I was up and running.

A series of problems led me to abandon this approach.

First, changing from the default permalink style (?p=123) caused all blog posts to 404.  Despite reading in the instructions that I must not have set AllowOverride None in the Apache config, I neglected to check that and spent an hour or so trying to track down the wordpress 404 issue.  To reiterate the solution: change the AllowOverride directive from AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All. WordPress writes its own .htaccess files, which use Apache’s mod_rewrite to route those pretty permalinks. But if you don’t allow .htaccess to override the server config, then of course it won’t work. This is mentioned halfway down on WordPress’s permalink documentation page, so it’s nothing but user error here.

Recent versions of WordPress have the nifty ability to upgrade themselves.  They also have an integrated tool for searching and installing WordPress plugins.  However they will only work if the WordPress directory is writeable by the user Apache runs as.  The Ubuntu installation is owned by root and not writeable by Apache, so those features do not work.  I tried a recursive chown on the directory, but this broke WordPress in horrible ways. Okay, forget Ubuntu’s nonstandard WordPress. Next I installed a vanilla WordPress from wordpress.org.  This solved the problem with the apache-writeable directory, but I apparently lost the multi-blog ability.  I guess Ubuntu’s wordpress (not WordPress MU, mind you) has been modified by Canonical to support multiblogs?  I tried duplicating the trick employed by Ubuntu WordPress.  Namely, creating a symlink from the WordPress application directory into each blog directory.  This did not work.

At this point, I was getting pretty annoyed by WordPress.  I chose it because it’s popular, and therefore presumably easy to install.  Since that wasn’t turning out to be the case for me, and due to my desire to move from PHP to modern web architectures, I decided to move on.

I decided that I need a blog.  I had earlier in my life used a personal blog on livejournal.com, but I want something more professional now.  It will be as much for myself as for any readers, and so it won’t bother me any if there are none.  I intended to use it to catalogue and index my open source software dealings.  Very often I find I have spent several hours on googling, reading man pages, and testing out esoteric command line sentences setting up some platform.  Sometimes I’ll find myself needing to do that same setup again down the road, and I will find myself searching my google history (hoping I was logged in to google) and grepping my bash history (assuming I still have it).

I need a place to store this stuff and keep it organized.  That’s what this blog is.  A record of those technical notes, commands, and links.