Monthly Archives: April 2008

Not quite so hairy anymore

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It’s 2008 – just about time for my haircut, so I reasoned. Suffice it to say, I no longer look like Medusa, though it possibly hasn’t purged the inner evil. I had thought about getting my head shaved for charity, since not only would I be contributing to the general good, but it would also be far cheaper. I didn’t, because I’m me and I frequently don’t take my advice.

On another note, I was somewhat taken aback at being asked, during this delicate surgical operation, if I had any children. Either I sound more experienced and generally wiser than I should, or I just look old. Scariest of all is the possibility that this is no longer an odd question to ask someone my age.

Redeployment

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Sadly, due to seemingly increasingly frequent downtime at bur.st, I’ve shifted Dave’s Archives over to a paid service – Jumba. In the process, I’ve discovered to my amusement and mild shock that one doesn’t actually need to use the command line anymore in order to set up a website on a Linux machine, even if you have PHP web applications with database backends. Jumba (and, I’m informed, most other web hosting services that run Linux) lets you use a web-based interface called cPanel to manipulate just about everything you could possibly want to manipulate. It even has a web-based file manager built in, which actually works in Konqueror. It even has an add-on called Fantastico, which will install and configure web applications (like WordPress) with little more than a couple of button clicks on your part. I’ve shifted the entire site – database, theme and other miscellaneous settings – without even glimpsing the command line.

I suppose a few seasoned web developers are raising their eyebrows wondering how I managed to find a rock large enough to hide under for the last five years, or for however long this sort of thing has been going on. This is a new thing for me. My brain associates “using Linux” with either GNOME, KDE or the command-line, the first two of which are (generally) irrelevant if you’re accessing the computer remotely. Nostalgia be damned. I have seen the light, and it is good.