hosting

Hosting Controller looks interesting. Anyone have any experience with it?

I receive many messages similar to this one:

so what if I want to set up a blog and play with it for a bit before I publish it to the world? How would you recommend I go about that? Do I need my own domain and hosting service first?

Here’s what I can tell you. In order to have a blog, you need a place to *put* it first. (First you have to register your domain (e.g. myblog.com). That is done through a registrar. My favorite is dotster.com.) Once you have a domain registered, you have to have some web space on which to host your site. You do that with a host. That’s (basically) the computer on which your web site resides.

You don’t have to have your own domain, though. Most ISPs allow you some web space on which you can host a page. I think AOL does and I’m almost sure that Earthlink does, too. In that case you would have space at (for example) http://www.aol.com/yourusername/ and then you could put your blog there.

Blogger is a free service that provides both a blogging system and web space, through Blog*Spot. That’s probably the best place to go if you’re a beginner.

Obviously there’s a lot more to it than that, but hopefully that’s enough to get you started. If you’re interested in having your own blog, please let me know if I can help in any way.

I have MovableType running now and this blog, Works in Progress is a MovableType blog! I’m using DreamHost as my web host, and thought - on the off-chance that anyone reads anything here ever - that I’d note some things specific to DreamHost.
The most important thing to note is that under DreamHost a user has an account root. This is where you should place your MovableType db directory.
I have several domains hosted at DreamHost, so when I connect using WS_FTP I start in my root account. That means I’m presented with a directory for each of the domains I have hosted there. Aside from some shell-specific variable files, this root directory only contains one directory for each domain hosted, and, now, my MovableType db directory.
The path to your root account at DreamHost is simply: /home/username/
So, assuming you name your db directory db, the DataSource variable in your mt.cfg file should read: DataSource /home/username/db
Obviously replace username with your DreamHost username.

For some reason I cannot FTP or SMTP to davidgagne.net from my office. I know you’re asking, “David, what does that mean?” It means I can’t upload anything to my site from work (no new songs!), I can’t send eMail through my davidgagne.net account from work, and I can’t modify any of the files at davidgagne.net from work.

I think, for some reason, my company is blocking ports 21 and 25 from my desktop. It doesn’t really make much sense, from a security point of view. I can kinda understand why they would kill my FTP access, but why stop me from sending SMTP but not from receiving POP? Are they worried that I’m going to send a virus from work, but not that I might receive one here? Who knows?

Yesterday I thought the problem might be with Dreamhost, but they told me that there is nothing wrong with my eMail or FTP. Then I realized that I could still FTP through Blogger and greyMatter, and that I can eMail and FTP from home. So the culprit must be something done by the administrators of my office network connection in Kentucky.

You don’t even care, do you?

So. My domain name (davidgagne.net) registration expired on February 9. Rather than do something silly, like send me an eMail to warn me that it was about to expire, the folks at dotster simply closed my home on the ‘net and replaced it with that Renewal Notice. As far as I can tell, I got lucky and nobody else decided to renew my name for me. I realized what had happened Sunday morning and promptly sent them my credit card information to bill me for another year. As of now (about 3 pm) the site is still down and I can’t get my eMail or anything. Interestingly enough, I still have FTP access, so posting this to Blogger might actually work. I don’t know. The Renewal Notice has been replaced with a message saying that I’ve re-registered and everything should be fine in a few hours. But still. Geez.