And ... we're up

After some fits and starts, we're up and relatively stable. Still have some things to work on, but you can see the site here at the moment. (I'll do the redirect later on to be off of the main URL.)

Several things are still not up and running (RSS feeds, subscription bits, and it's pulling in a generic YouTube video feed - need to kill that off soon). But you can see the basic structure of it. 

Once the last tweaks are done, I'll start building the training modules for it. I'm still playing with the CSS code - the default theme is blue, trying to decide if it all needs to go red. I did some of it in red earlier and it got hard to read.

Also need to build and upload a favicon ... open to ideas for that graphic. Should it just be the Grady version of the arch?

Progress ... stalled

I'm a little afraid of walking into the building today as Janet may shoot me ... we've been trying to get the software up and running most of the day - her in the building, me from home. We had it up for a little while, then I flipped a switch or toggle or clicked a button and it all went splat.

Not entirely sure what I did yet, but I'll probably restart from scratch. Thankfully, I hadn't gotten too far along when it went down. I don't think it was a server-side problem, I'm pretty sure it happened while I was trying to activate one of the plugins for the custom theme we'll be using.

The software, WordPress, is essentially just an intermediate piece of code. All of your data (in our case, stories, photos, videos, links, etc.) get stored in a database called MySQL. On the other side of WordPress, you have a theme - a way of controlling how that data gets presented. WordPress does the handoff from one to the other.

We'll feed info into the database on a regular basis, and that seems to be up and stable. The theme we'll be using is fairly complex, slightly more complex than the ones I use on the other blogs I maintain. It contains a few plugins to deal with popular entries and things like that, as well as a handy contact/feedback form. I was working on the feedback form when I crunched it.

I probably owe Janet lunch by now. Though if she finds out we blog about it, she may pass ...

Behind the Front, Part the Fourth

Came across another social media/microblogging site this morning - identi.ca. So I grabbed gradyjournal on that, too. It appears to mimic Twitter in its format and workings, and with Twitter being so unstable at this point ... well, let's just say David has a shot at Goliath.

Widgets

Added the Twitter widget to a WordPress blog ... and it slowed loading to a crawl. Killing that for now ...

Practice, Practice

As I wait for the final bits to be coded on the new Xserve, I've been practicing my WordPress installation skills on my new personal blog. (Yeah, shameless plug.)

There are a number of ways to go about a WordPress install. The software is free to download and has tons of user support available, one of the reasons we ended up going this route. If you're doing your own and don't have a hosting company already, there are lots of places that specialize in WP installs, some with one-click processes. 

That isn't the case for us with the new site, and it isn't the case on the new personal blog, either. So I've been wading into Plesk to set permissions, reconfiguring Akismet spam filters and other such things for the last few hours, trying to get everything just right. Lots of notes on the second screen, things to do, things not to do ...

Behind the Front, Part III

Added FriendFeed to the every growing list of things we may someday find a use for.

Behind the Front, Part 2

Added Flickr and MySpace, as well.