The Dev Shack » WordPress http://www.thedevshack.com Technology and Programming Blog Mon, 06 Jun 2011 00:13:16 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.3 Finally Giving The Rackspace Cloud a Try http://www.thedevshack.com/finally-giving-the-rackspace-cloud-a-try/ http://www.thedevshack.com/finally-giving-the-rackspace-cloud-a-try/#comments Fri, 17 Sep 2010 13:03:20 +0000 mfleming http://www.thedevshack.com/?p=389 I have been keeping an eye on the cloud offering from Rackspace for awhile now.  Earlier this week I finally created an account and setup my first server.  Many of my blogs utilize WordPress and sit on a shared hosting platform.  Most of my systems administration knowledge lies in the Windows world, so I have always relied on shared hosting for any LAMP based setups.  So this gave me a chance to learn some new things in this process: Using the Rackspace cloud and learning more about systems administration tasks on a Linux based server.

As of this morning I have successfully moved over three sites from my shared hosting platform over to a Ubuntu Server I setup via the Rackspace cloud.  So far the experience on the Rackspace side of things has been great.  After setting up my account I was able to spin up a new server in a couple of minutes.  I also created a second one to test some things out on, and once done I just deleted that server from my account.  It’s really great to be able to spin up a server and delete it at will.  You can choose from a variety of Linux setups (I chose a 64-bit version of Ubuntu 10.04) and a variety of Windows setups.  The Windows option was recently added in the last couple of months.

From a systems administration side I had a lot to learn about some of the tasks involved in setting up and moving the sites over.  The Ubuntu community is very large and very helpful when questions arise.  I was able to get things working a lot quicker than I had anticipated in the beginning.  IIS on Windows is a much different world than Apache!  I learn more tricks everyday, but while frustrating at times it’s good to be gaining this additional knowledge.

If anyone is interested in seeing some screenshots of the Rackspace cloud server setup leave a note in the comments and I will post some.  Not sure if this worthwhile to post those or not.

]]> http://www.thedevshack.com/finally-giving-the-rackspace-cloud-a-try/feed/ 3 Great WordPress Plugin – Absolute Privacy http://www.thedevshack.com/great-wordpress-plugin-absolute-privacy/ http://www.thedevshack.com/great-wordpress-plugin-absolute-privacy/#comments Tue, 05 May 2009 10:54:08 +0000 mfleming http://www.thedevshack.com/?p=195 For those of you that follow this blog, you know I was looking for a web based code snippet library. After checking out some of the ones I came across I ended up making the decision to use a WordPress blog for the library. It has everything I needed out of the box (categories, tags, multiple authors, RSS etc…). The only two pieces I needed to add in were a code highlighter (which there are many of) and most importantly a mechanism to allow me to make the entire blog private. I did not want the general public to come across the code snippets, nor did I want the blog indexed. I was surprised to see that out of the box WordPress does not offer this feature. After a quick search I came across a new plugin named Absolute Privacy written by John Kolbert. This plugin does exactly what I needed to do. Once you download the plugin all you need to do is go to the settings page and check a box that enables the feature. By doing this your entire blog is protected via login. So far this has worked well, and WordPress is doing it’s normal good job.

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