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A look behind the scenes…
17 March 2008
I’ve already had a few comments upon switching the flip to “On” for Wire-trace.com. The main one has been, “Oh, puurrdy. What fuels it?” The obvious answer to anyone looking at the footer is “Wordpress,” but this also isn’t some bog-standard setup, either. It’s almost a homebrew, a conglomerate of my work and that of one of my good friends up in the frozen, moose-filled north of Canada.
So, when I say homebrew, what do I mean? Well, let’s take a look:
- Server: The actual webserver (supplied by my friend up in Canada) is a Gentoo system running Apache2. You can run the same thing at home for absolutely no cost and setting it up isn’t all that hard. However, for those without a lot of Linux knowledge (or any at all), I’d highly recommend this simple guide written by my friend Glider and I.
- Webpage: As you can easily see, the webpage is powered with Wordpress, which is running a very heavily modified theme by Refueled.Net. If you’re in the market for a free, clean and well-constructed theme, I’d highly recommend starting there. Over time, the theme will become more my own, but it’s always good to pay homage to those who came before.
- Images: For images, there can be no substitute for good old Gallery2. I’ve personalized it with the PG X-Treme theme, and crammed it into the Wordpress portion of the site via the incredibly handy WPG2 plugin. For the record, WPG2 is fantastic - but it requires some modification under the hood. Don’t be surprised if it doesn’t do quite what you want (particularly with portrait-oriented pictures) without some serious fiddling with the CSS.
So, that’s the basics behind it. I describe it as “homebrew” because not a single part of this is based on commercial applications. Linux distributions are free and well supported. Wordpress and Gallery2 are as well. And if you wanted to follow along at home, you should be able to set up a similar server with an old system that you previously were going to throw away, which can save some bucks on webhosting. Indeed, all of this will run quite comfortably on computers that are four or five years old, and once it’s set up then it doesn’t require a keyboard, mouse or monitor.
This is, of course, as long as your Internet Service Provider (ISP) is alright with it, at least… mine at home actually scans for webservers and blocks them, which is why I run mine through my Canadian allies.
For those of you who are serious about having your own site but don’t really want to know anything about how a webserver works, just make sure that the host you sign up with allows you to install both Wordpress and Gallery2. If they don’t know what that means for your needs, then you should probably look elsewhere.
As you can see, this means that all of my display and publishing operations are free, at least on the web end of things. I do this so far on the cheap because the rest of this hobby does cost money, and I’m all about keeping costs down. So when I can do it for cheaper, I do!
By the way, anyone using this stuff should show a little love and donate so these poor chaps get something for their hard work. Rule #1 - always support those who support open source!
Topics: Publishing and Display |