I started my series about bzr as an excuse to teach myself something that may be useful at work, and as a way to see if I enjoyed writing content. Which, for now, I do. I was using blogger, and quickly got fed up with the lack of options, and a fairly frustrating editing experience. So, I started to look into other options. I don’t think I’ve put a site online for personal use/work since 1998 or so. This project also served as a way to see how things are done these days. It’s been a fun experience.
First Steps
After doing some research I ran across Linode for my hosting solution. They were offering everything I wanted for not a ton of money. I get a pretty fast box, with 36oMB of ram, 12G of disk an 200G a month of transfer. This seemed like more than enough for me. I get full control over the machine; I can reboot/reinstall/do whatever I want. They even provide a remote console in case something goes wrong. They give you 10+ common linux distributions to choose from for the base install. The process was as easy as: pay them, pick your distro, click go. 30 second later I had my vanilla install.
I needed a domain name so I went to godaddy and was underwhelmed by their site. Their service was actually very good, but I really had to dig around to find what I was looking for. They also really try to attach every possible service in the world to a simple domain. In the end I just got the domain and privacy option (doesn’t expose stuff like my home address under whois). As soon as possible I transferred DNS for the domain over to linode’s dns servers. This process was quick and painless.
I think it took me about an hour from getting off my butt to get this setup to having a machine and working DNS. All of this happened on a Sunday afternoon. Things definitely seem to work better than they did when I had to wait for a few days for Network Solutions to turn around registrations for me “back in the day.”
Wordpress
Installing wordpress was fairly straight forward. I followed the 5 minute install guide and was mostly running pretty quickly. The one thing that they don’t mention clearly, that they probably should, is that you really don’t want to use the default wp_ prefix. Leaving as default makes it a little easier for an attacker to get to your tables from vulns in wordpress. Changing this isn’t a ton of protection, but it can’t hurt. I did this after I was installed, so making the change was a bit of a pain, the instructions here worked fairly well. I also followed several of the suggestions here about securing wordpress. I also took some additional steps at the OS level. I’m sure if someone wanted to get in they could.
There were a number of other things I wanted to get working. Google Analytics was pretty easy to get going. Add the slug to my template footer and it just worked. AdSense was pretty easy as well, just added the code to a text widget. Feedburner was really the most frustrating part of the experience. I really wanted the feed to be a one or two hundred word summary, but I just couldn’t make it work. The feed summarize feature in feedburner just seemed to use the wordpress auto generated excerpts which are surprisingly inflexible. I know there are plug-ins that will deal with that, but it really wasn’t a huge deal. I got a plug-in that can inject css into the feed so I can get a little bit of styling on my feed.
Other
I wanted to make sure I had regular backups of my system. So I wrote a wp_backup.sh. It’s not anything special, but it gets me backups. I then got awstats setup using a pretty decent reference on how ubuntu wants awstats to work. I’ve been going against my natural inclination to do everything by hand, and letting ubuntu’s package management stuff take care of things for me (for the most part, wordpress was still a hand install).
I used google’s tools for webmasters to get my site added to google, added a plugin to auto generate and submit site-maps, and added an appropriate robots.txt. The site is actually getting indexed now. I’m waiting for the flood of people who want to read about bazaar. 
Closing
This has been a really fun project. It has been interesting to see how things are done now vs. when I was setting up medical journal sites. The parts haven’t changed a whole lot, but what used to take a month can be done in a few days. Kudos to Google for the amount of stuff they give away.
