Hacking Journal [2006/01/17]
RakeSite and SysAdmin
[2006/01/17]
Yesterday I caught a hacking bug and just had to hack on something. Since I left my Agile Web Development with Rails book at work I decided to try to hack on my Rake built website. In less that 90 minutes I have reproduced about 90% of my business website. The only part that is missing is the index.html page, but that is because I want to do it a bit differently. I will probably hack on this some more later, but I really want to work on a Rails blog engine first, Typo is starting to feel rather large for my tastes. Don’t get me wrong, it is a great piece of software and does a wonderful job of what it does but it just has too many features for me. I know I am not alone in wanting a simple blog engine, and I fell Rails can provide that easily. I plan of Open Sourcing it, and also trying to develop it the XP way, similar to what John Wilger is doing with eXPlainPMT.
In other news I am playing the role of the sysadmin at work. It is a Win32 environment and the current sysadmin/programmer is off so I am kinda filling in for him. We have had issues with our Web/MySQL/Mail server that runs NT so I have been busy getting a Debian Sarge server up as a replacement. I am actually starting to get pretty good at my unix-foo, took about 12 hours from boot to having all our website (thank you Subversion), a pop3/imap/smtp mailer, MySQL, and a ton of little stupid things on it. The hardest part was manually setting up our mailing list alias and our mail users… that took 2 hours. Funniest part was dumping some weird web authentication system into Apache’s htaccess. I wrote a ruby migration script that worked perfectly. Anyways, I shall try to take it live tomorrow and will either swear off linux or get to be home just after 5PM. :)
Eric Davis
