Monthly Archive for October, 2007

Time to Face Facebook?

Despite having a blog or two, I’ve been inactive in the Web 2.0 world - but fantastically curious about it. I mean, I have profiles at Blogger (the blog system I no longer use), Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, YouTube, Newsvine, Digg, and so many others. But I’m not really that into the “social” scene; its kinda the story of my life. I don’t have a MySpace page and until I read this article on Facebook users vs MySpace users, I didn’t have a Facebook profile either.

But I created one after reading this essay by Danah Boyd. It was really interesting to read how she believes the two competing social networks are, in fact, another form of social divisions - class warfare. I’m not really going to get into that myself but I am enjoying being able to connect with people from my high school. I’ve been reluctant to contact everyone (a little of fear they’ll reject me) but I think I’ll just go ahead and start contacting them anyway.

I guess it’s time to face the music on Facebook.

So Bored With Computing… I Built My Own Web Server

Wow! My first post using Wordpress 2.3!

Anyway…

Besides doing the automated install of Wordpress 2.3, my computing life has been pretty boring. I have no new gadgets to keep me busy and no cool programs to toy with. All I’ve been doing with my computer is the normal web surfing, iTunes listening, and working at odd hours (thanks to Parallels running Windows XP on my Mac).

But I have this old computer and my very powerful PC that I built by myself. Well, with the help of my friend. It just sits there, though. Unpowered and unused. Until last weekend…

Or maybe it was two weekends ago…. well, anyway…

I took my desktop Ubuntu build and wiped it clean. I was still on 6.10 since I got my Mac mini in December-ish of last year. Plus, I have 7.04 on my IBM laptop so I hadn’t been using it in a long time. I installed Ubuntu 7.04 Server on it and started to set up a website. But not just a website, Wordpress!

Man, the folks who are behind Ubuntu are great. Canonical has done such a great job with Ubuntu; Linux wouldn’t be what it is today without it. All I had to do to get my webserver up and running was type the following line of code:

sudo apt-get install wordpress

That’s it!

Well, to be honest, there was more to it. I did have to figure out how to configure a few things here and there to get the install working the way I wanted but it wasn’t more than a few lines of code in a text editor. I didn’t even need to actually use the computer in the typical sense. I installed OpenSSH before I started the whole process so I used the terminal app built into OS X to do everything.

So now, if you go to my internal address of 192.168.1.106, you get to see my Wordpress 2.3 blog. Next week, I’m going to try and build a firewall/router out of the other computer using Linux, natch. I’ll create some route statements to direct web traffic to the web server and open it up to the internet.

So, like I said, I’m bored with my computers. Bored enough to build my own web LAMP server and future firewall.

Yawn…




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