Scott’s Blog

I usually use the basic web interface from WordPress to edit my blog. I’ve read about other bloggers using other blogging clients, and some of them are pretty nice, with flickr integration and stuff like that, so I thought I would try one. I’m posting this from Ecto. It’s a Mac blogging client that seems pretty cool. I’ll have a go at it for a few entries. The only downside is that I often blog from work, where I only have Linux or Windows, and not a Mac. Hence the lowest common denominator of the WordPress web interface.

Anyways, consider this a test.

I use Tomboy a lot on my work computer. It’s a great note taking application. I also used it quite a bit on my home machine, which was a FreeBSD box with Gnome on it. Since I’ve become a switcher I’ve been looking for a program for my Mac that will serve a similar purpose. One that’s come up in my research is Journler. I’m going to try it out for a while and see how it makes out. Apparently it also can post directly to my Blog, so if this appears in my Blog, I’ll know it works!

I used to run my blog on my own server in a virtual machine on a box in our lab. It was connected outside the firewall on FreeBSD, and lived happily in the wild for about three years. Recently we’ve changed our infrastructure around for internet connectivity, forcing me to move that virtual machine. At the prompting of Bart, who is paranoid that I might write something that gets slashdotted, I decided to move my blog to a hosting provider, and I selected WordPress.

My old blog on Movable Type on my old server had a number of images which were linked in blog posts. I didn’t want to edit dozens of blog posts and change URLS of images (because I’m lazy) so I just moved my old VM to my workstation, ran it in VMware Server, and poked it through the firewall so that the images would work. That was suboptimal because my workstation isn’t always on, and I don’t have extra resources to run a VM all the time.

To improve the situation I decided that I needed to move the images to a little apache server somewhere other than my workstation. I have also been trying to figure out how Solaris 10 zones work, and we just happen to have this nice presently under-utilized Sun x4500 (we bought it for the 24 TB of storage) sitting in our server room. A solution and a learning opportunity collided and I decided to build a webserver with Apache2 inside a Solaris zone, and stick my images from my Blog on there.

I created a new zone, with a new IP address using zonecfg and zoneadm. Then I installed and configured it, and started it up. I installed the apache2 package from Blastwave, created a user for myself inside the zone, and configured apache to allow user directories. Then I just copied my file content over from my old virtual machine, changed the port forwarding entry on the firewall, and voila! Images served from a ridiculously overpowered webserver. I probably have the highest server capacity to traffic ratio for my blog’s images in the world.

I have been blogging with Movable Type for quite a while. My posts from my MT blog date back to August 2004. My recent switchover to a hosted blog on WordPress has actually been pretty fun. I was writing some posts today and I noticed the stats pages for my blog. Considering my nonexistent readership, I was reminded of this old Dilbert cartoon, the punch-line of which was something like “Never has so little been measured so much.”

The management interface lets you see how many page views there were for each post, how many clicks there were on different URLs in your posts, and what search terms are resulting in links to your blog pages. Very neat. There’s also a stats page for the subscription feed to the blog, so you can tell how many people syndicate your blog.

I moved my posts over from my self-hosted Movable Type blog to this one today and I was amazed how well WordPress imported my blog entries. They all came over with times, dates and categories in tact. The categories were created on the fly by WordPress when I did the import. Now I just have to figure out what to do with all my images. WordPress has file hosting that would fit all my files, but I’d have to edit every blog entry that references an image. If I’m going to do that, I might look into an image hosting services instead so that as I post more, they won’t get too big for WordPress’s small 50 MB free file hosting cap.

I was running my blog on Movable Type on my own little virtual server in our lab. We recently switched off our lab’s separate internet connection, which decommissioned my virtual server. I had to find new hosting for my blog, and here it is on wordpress.

In the extremely unlikely event that I ever post something that gets seriously dug on digg, or linked on Slashdot, I figured I should setup my blog somewhere that can handle the slashdot effect, rather than on corporate infrastructure.

I’m going to set up a redirector at the old url to point at this one, and I’ll have to fix up my links on my old posts, plus my photos, so the blog will only be semi-functional for a while, but hopefully not too long. The old posts should be imported soon.