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05/08/2006: "Trials and tribulations of running a dedicated webserver and web sites"

I started this weblog some time back and then ended up not writing any entries in it for almost 7 months. I have now found some time to come back to it and will now continue to write on this blog. My main website is my Oracle security website that I have been running for a few years now and as its name suggests is dedicated to Oracle Security. I started a weblog on that site almost two years ago and that is how i became aquanted with web logs and also the Greymatter software.

My site has grown both in terms numbers of pages and also visitors. I therefore made a decision to move to a dedicated server some time back and I have finally accomplished this recently. The site was happilly running on a shared server but was quite slow and also the shared hosting had limitations in terms of the size of the space available and also in terms of some of the features I could use. For instance mod_rewrite was not available to be.

I now have a much bigger task in terms of running the website as it is now down to me to configure everything, do backups and keep the site running.

I had always intended this weblog to be a place to talk about some of the features of my website where it involved coding, configuration or the like so now running a dedicated webserver has goven me a great oppertunity to also talk about running a website, nuts, bolts warts and all.

So its time to get this blog running again and talk about some of the things I have done so far and also plan to do with the site. I invite you to come along for the ride!

I plan to talk about the configuration of the server, apache, sendmail, backups, webalizer and lots more. I also plan to talk about my sites development. I am going to cover guestbooks, CGI, wiki's, forums, blog software, RSS, translations, XML-RPC, coding in perl, php, shell and more. Some of the key areas I want to explore will be extending the site, templates, changing or improving my blog software and also some stuff to do with CSS, HTML and my sites layout.

OK, thats lost of things to cover. My first task is to discuss whether to move to Wordpress, which I had been planning to do for some time or to try and improve greymatter. I will talk about that next.