Blogging in the heat of the moment

This was originally a reply to liverbones’ comment of my last post, but it became long so I gave it a home of its own.

Just about every day I run across some design or technical problem that I can only solve through blogs or message boards. Its an amazing resource, and I couldn’t get by without it. However, I find that the solutions are often lacking.

The problem is that the tech guru who is answering the question usually figured out the thing in question long ago, and can’t remember quite what their personal “Ah HAH!” moment was. So they leave the little stuff out. For instance, if you’re not used to linux command line stuff, and you install something that you have to initialize through the command line, you cannot just type in shell$ foo and expect it to work. Most likely, the command foo is not in your path. So you actually have to go to the file where the program is, then type in shell$ ./foo. The “.” tells your computer that the command can be found in this directory. But ask a linux guru how to initialize a program, and she will tell you “Just type in foo” at the command line. Its not that they don’t know how to do it right, its that they know it so well that they forgot to tell you. This why the best answers come from bloggers who are right in the heat of the moment, still trying to figure it out when they post.

For instance, I posted my GoDaddy entry just yesterday. But I had been working on getting wordpress set up on GoDaddy for hours. Actually, to be honest, days. This blog helped, as did the comments on this post, but it made everything seem so easy. Fact is, when I first uploaded the site, nothing worked at all.

I struggled with the wp-config file forever. Then I enabled pretty urls, which broke everything, and spent several hours downloading and uploading the .htaccess file trying to modify just the right thing. It was only after I gave up (because of a blog post that mentioned if you just wait, everything will work), waited two days, and tried again that it worked. Instantly. For no reason at all.

So my point is, because I treasure the thoughtful, generous people who document their sometimes painful journey through the trials of learning how to do stuff with computers, I am going to start blogging while I’m still trying to figure shit out.

MilhollandCycles.com

This is a progress report on MilhollandCycles.com, website I am building for my brother Greg, who builds bicycles in our house in Portland. His bikes are great. He built me the coolest fillet braised mountain bike that languishes in the basement while I try to save enough cash to get paint and parts on it. I think about it every day, and when the sun is out and I’m not at work it kills me that I am not mountain biking every second.

So I built Greg a theme for wordpress. It was pretty straight forward. I love wordpress. The code is elegant and extensible, and you can do whatever the hell you want to with it. I built Greg’s theme on top of the default theme that comes with the wordpress download. switch around a few php include tags and give it a new style.css document and you’re in business. I host my sites in the webserver document folder on my laptop because I can’t get virtual domains to work, but that’s another post. Anyhow, its a great testing platform because I can view the sites as they are served from the apache server on my laptop. Most of the time its just like they are live on the ‘net. Not always though. Some of the plugins (lightbox in particular) didn’t work quite right.

Thankfully when I uploaded the site to godaddy (I know what you are thinking, don’t judge me!), everything miraculously worked. Plugins, pages, everything. Except pretty URLs, that broke everything. But it wasn’t THAT hard to fix, you just have to erase all of the stuff that wordpress adds to the .htaccess file and replace it with a clean one.

The thing that vexes me is no shell access. I didn’t even think about this when choosing hosting services, but godaddy does not allow shell access. That means that you have to manipulate SQL tables with phpMyAdmin. I do not like this program. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer the hands-approach. I just don’t trust the GUI to be messing with my SQL. Maybe I shouldn’t worry about it. WordPress has done a fine job all on its own. But I am worried. Enough so that I won’t host another site on godaddy again. Sorry.