Getting Started
It has taken longer than I anticipated (as does every project), but this weblog is underway. In this category I will document what goes into the creation, maintenance and growth of this site.
Although getting to this point has taken longer than I expected, it has still not taken very long. Although it has been nearly a week and I have only a couple of posts and a very meager layout, I have only been able to devote an hour or two here and there. Above all, the process has been educational.
There have been two sources of delay. The first is minor, and is a just a matter of bad timing. I began setting up this site using Blosxom 2.0 Beta RC5, which I thought was current. Several hours later, I learned that Blosxom 2.0 final had been released, along with a new website. I don’t know if I had followed an out of date link, or if the old site was not redirecting to the new site (which it does now). When I did learn of my mistake, I decided to replace blosxom.cgi and all of my plugins with new versions from the new site. Unfortunately, the plugin registry on the new site links to outdated versions of several plugins. More time lost, but more knowledge gained; I’ll call it an even trade. Perhaps this was just a case of growing pains.
The other source of delay has been a much bigger problem. The hosting firm I am using, iPowerWeb, does not offer shell access. I have used them previously, and found the provided web-based admin site they provide to be adequate. However, they have recently introduced a new admin interface, with which I have not fared as well. Again, I seem to be the victim of growing pains. The issue is that many of the functions (e.g. chmod, file rename, file delete) are implemented with client side javascript, which appears to contain bugs. The code will not run in Safari 1.0 or IE5.5/Mac. It does, of course work in IE/Win. So, much computer-hopping has been required. iPowerWeb support has escalated the issue to the development staff, and claim that they are working on it. In the meanwhile, they suggest using Mozilla Firebird. Perhaps I’ll try it.
But there is another issue with iPowerWeb’s admin interface, which I have not yet sent to support. The provided editor uses CR/LF for newlines, but my host runs Unix (i386-FreeBSD). The perl interpreter does not like finding s in perl code; it has also caused textile -encoded posts to render without formatting . For now, my solution has been to find a decent (well, half decent) ftp client (review to come later), and to do my script editing locally, and my post editing via wikieditish. Even my early attempts with wikieditish had s. I’m guessing this is because the HTTP spec mandates the use of CR/LFs, which in turn would cause CR/LFs to appear in textareas. One of these days I’ll research further, for now I’ll work around.
Having successfully passed these hurdles, I have begun posting to the weblog. In future posts I’ll detail where I hope to go from here.
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