Yes. Me. Seriously.
I’m beginning to work with clients on advertising and marketing campaigns. While I do like the data analysis and technical side of this, the idea of being a marketer is kind of new. Plus I’m mentally adapted to assuming marketers are sleazebags.
Apparently we all aren’t sleazebags. Yet.
A good start for WordPress bloggers is http://www.upstartblogger.com/blog-to-success-with-stats-tracking
I installed WordPress on my Joyent accelerator by following the wiki instructions but since they’re a bit older, ran into a couple of problems that required some after-the-fact tweaking.
Basically, if you want to use the sexy new WP capabilities for automatically upgrading, directly uploading themes, etc you want to ensure that the process running WP can access the files. I had uploaded WP as a user, so my list files were owned by ashenfelter.com:ashenfelter.com while new files created by WP plugins (eg sitemap.xml) were owned by www:www. Solution?
web/public >sudo chown -R www:www .
As dozens if not hundreds of posts on the WP forums/etc warn — please DO NOT try to solve this kind of problem by chmod 777 unless you like being hacked.
I’ll be honest upfront that I have a love/hate relationship with Joyent.
One the plus side, I have 3 lifetime accounts — yes, lifetime. When TextDrive, the original company, was bootstrapping themselves, they took the unusual step of offering several rounds of VC (venture capital) lifetime hosting accounts. Breakeven point compared to monthly hosting was about 16months as I remember so considering I’m on year 5(?) I think I’m pretty ahead of the game.
For those that care, I have the equivalent of two Shared Accelerator accounts and one Dedicated (M) Sized Accelerator. Since Joyent bought TextDrive, everything has migrated from FreeBSD to their Solaris based virtual machines (sort of like Xen on Linux). I finally migrated my FreeBSD boxes onto their Shared Solaris machines this month and restarted my long dormant WordPress blog.
Install on the Shared Accelerator was a breeze! The VirtualMin control panel has an install script for WordPress 2.8.5 which then could autoupdate itself to 2.9.x. The only problem is that WordPress on Shared Joyent Accelerators is so slow as to be unusable. Seems like there’s plenty in the forums about it. And by unusable I mean 5-15s (SECONDS!) to render a simple WP post. Admin side could take well over 30-60s. I installed WP-SuperCache and basically had no real improvement. #fail.
Fortunately I had the Dedicated Accelerator. Turns out WP actually runs pretty well on that machine. It’s dedicated space, so it *should* run faster, but my Shared FreeBSD server ran circles around the equivalent Solaris server as well. Chalk it up to shared hosting and it’s resource sharing versus dedicated resources for virtual machines.
Of course I had to manually install everything and then fight a bit with permissions to get everything working. Seems like PHP hasn’t changed *that* much in the years I’ve been avoiding it! But you’re looking at the final result — my personal ashenfelter.com site and my corporate transitionpoint.com site both running WordPress on a Solaris virtual machine.
Hi, my name is John Paul Ashenfelter.
I build web applications. I also run Transitionpoint — perhaps we could build your next web application?
Nearly all of my new work over the past 3 years has been Ruby on Rails, but I use anything that helps me build better applications with less time and effort. I’ve done a lot of work with ColdFusion and still work on some busy and profitable CFML sites. I also have used a number of open source tools like Drupal and WordPress.
I’m neurotically focused on automation, testing, and agile development techniques.
