New host, new theme, new links

August 4, 2007

I made a number of changes this morning that I have been playing with for a while.

New Host

A long, long time ago (at least in Internet years), I started hosting sites from a server at my house via DSL with a static IP. The main impetus for doing it back then is because most hosts:

  • Were expensive - $20 per month for the basics
  • Had limited disk space - You were lucky to get 100MB for your $20/month
  • Offered little control - I wanted to be able to install and run whatever I wanted

Being the good developer that I am, I wanted complete control and the ability to have more space. I didn’t want to be tied into a Microsoft-only host or a LAMP-only host. I wanted to be able to do ASP and PHP at the same time for different sites. And of course, I didn’t really want to pay much for it. Never mind the fact that I’ve been paying extra for my DSL service to have the ability to have static IP addresses. However, it has finally gotten to the point where hosting services and disk space are a commodity and it is no longer worth while for me to go through the effort to host from home.

I’ve used a number of hosts over the years and have seen lots of people shilling for their hosting services so I’m pretty well-versed in what is available. I’ve even gotten screwed over by one or two back in the day so I was pretty cautious in my choices. There were however, two or three hosts that offered lots of features that were affordable to the average person. In the end, I went with DreamHost (yup, referral link) because of their awesome features:

I know some people have some complaints against DreamHost and their stability, but let’s face it, they would have to be really bad to be worse than what I can do myself over my DSL line. So far, in a couple of months of playing with the features on various sub domains, I like what I have seen and they pretty much offer all the flexibility that I really need.

New Theme

On my last make-over, I had attempted to incorporate the YUI Reset and Grids CSS along with my logo and my own custom design. Needless to say, if you have visited the site in the past year or so, you would know that it did not look pretty and was pretty much a failure. While I had the basics down, it was still very rough and since I had started the theme from scratch, there were a number of places that I missed so it looked pretty bad. Specifically, because the YUI Reset file resets all styles, there were many styles that I didn’t go back and implement, like blockquote, dl, dt, and dd. In addition, some of the plug-ins I was using, like SyntaxHighlighter, no longer worked with the reset styles. And of course, I probably did the last theme right before some big project was due so all I had time for was the basics and then I had to quit to focus on getting my project implemented.

One of the great things about DreamHost (yup, another referral link) and their One-Click Installs of WordPress is that they offer about 50 different pre-installed themes. While I have been working on my own custom theme (again), I could tell that it was going to take a lot longer than I wanted to get it tweaked the way I wanted. I was originally going to wait to make the transition to the new host until the theme was complete but that would take way too long. So, I chose one of the available themes that was pretty close to the direction I was going and called it done.

New Links

Since I was making such drastic changes to the site, I decided to go ahead and re-examine my link structure as well. During my last overhaul, I put the blog at the site root and all the posts were under the “/posts/08/04/…” urls. This time I wanted to do it a little differently and wanted my blog back under a sub-folder so that all the links began with “/blog/08/04/…” Since I am now on an official LAMP stack with a real .htaccess file, I didn’t have to bother with IIS workarounds for redirecting links. Of course, the only difficulty was trying to figure out how to work with the .htaccess file and how to redirect all my existing links without pissing of Google. It took me a while, but I figured out that DreamHost has a cool web-based FTP client that allows you to edit your .htaccess file. I ended up making the following modifications to the .htaccess file in the root of my site:
RedirectMatch 301 /posts(.*) http://swoofware.com/blog$1
RedirectMatch 301 /tags(.*) http://swoofware.com/blog/topic$1
This, in theory, should permanently redirect any inbound links to the old addresses to the new addresses. If you run across anything that is broke, just let me know. The only thing that I don’t have the way I want is that the SwoofWare heading at the top of the page should link to the site root (http://swoofware.com) and not the blog. I experimented several times with the Site and Blog settings in the Options, but it wasn’t working out too well. Oh well, it’s minor so I’ll live with it for a while.

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General, WordPress | 2 Comments 

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