This page is archived from a static page – some links may not work
My current project at TAFE is putting a Content Management Service onto our web server and creating a blog. For those who don’t know what a CMS is, its essentially what every other blogger uses to get their sites online. Once the CMS is installed on the server, all you need do is login, type your message and hit upload. It is that simple.
I prefer to struggle the hard way. My site is hand coded and updates are done manually. I do use some server side includes to make the management a little easier, however a lot of it is just copy and paste.
Moveable Type is the CMS of choice for many blogger’s, and most of them recommend it. As a result it is becoming increasingly popular, so it was MT that I decided was the best choice for my blog.
Well, it seemed it wasn’t such a good choice after all. It wasn’t the Moveable Type software causing the problem, it was the servers inability to cope with MySQL, the database that is used to power it all.
Our biggest problem at TAFE is the main network is highly protected, so any installations and computer administration work is done on an isolated network. There you can build networks using what ever operating system and software configuration is appropriate for the course. The disadvantage of that is… No Internet.
The server, attached to the Internet is supposed to correct problems with a degree of automation. This makes sense as most web servers access the Internet. Even the ones designed to only serve to the local area network still usually have Internet access if need be. No Internet… No easy fix!
After many hours of trying, we gave up on the Moveable Type idea and went to a php equivalent, a CMS called b2, which was easy to configure and was working fairly quickly. I did a test post and it all worked just fine so I’m kinda happy now.
As the idea is to run a blog on this server, I am going to post the updates I sporadically make here, on the TAFE server
Hmm, maybe I should tone down the language!
Footnote: In 2006 I started using WordPress as my CMS of choice. My feelings on using a CMS verses coding directly have changed and I believe that each has it’s own place.
