At the end of last week, a friend looked at this blog and asked how it was set up.

Origins

This all started in 2011 and it started with email. I had maintained a long term stable email address with MV communications. MV had been a major ISP in southern New Hampshire and by 2010 that business was nearly gone. When they finally went under I looked at my options for keeping a stable identity on the internet.

In the end I realized that buying a domain name and getting a web hosting was likely the best way to ensure that I had a permanent address on the internet and open up options beyond that. I don’t remember doing a huge amount of research on hosting companies, but I ended up using GoDaddy and so far have been happy with their service.

My web hosting is a ‘LAMP‘ hosting (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP).

• Linux is the operating system that the host computer runs.
• Apache is the web server that runs on it.
• MySQL is the database that is provided for storage.
• PHP is the programming language that runs on the web server.

In order to run a blog, you need (or at least really want) a software package that will let you store, edit and manage the articles and other content without going directly to files on the server. These are commonly referred to as content management systems (CMS). On the LAMP platform there have been three major free CMS packages:

• WordPress which started life as a dedicated blogging package but seems to have become a broader based CMS in recent years. It makes it pretty easy to get an attractive appearance and has a broad range of add on packages. Keep in mind that WordPress is both a software package (that I used here) and a hosting company that provides free, limited wordpress blogs.
• Drupal has a reputation as the most complex, capable and flexible CMS on LAMP systems. It is allegedly the programmer’s favorite but also seen as the most challenging to get up and configured.
• Joomla seemed to have a reputation as being a middle ground between simple wordpress blogging and the complexity of Drupal.

My first blog at ninecrows was a Joomla blog. It wasn’t a terrible experience and I got a feeling for what I wanted from the software and how to make a site work. On balance though, Joomla lacked a polished appearance and didn’t have the huge range of add ons that the other choices provided.

The WordPress Era

I eventually realized that my site can host multiple applications and that WordPress was worth a look. WordPress clearly met my blogging needs far better than Joomla with a huge range of choices in add ons, many books and online information sources and growing capability as newer versions became available. I added the http://ninecrows.com/blog and http://ninecrows.com/career sub-blogs. These are both free-standing WordPress instances that live in subfolders on my hosting.

The career blog has received the most attention until recently. I’ve used it as a way to provide more information on my interests, abilities and background than can be presented in my resume. Given my two job changes in the last couple of years, that has been a priority.

My personal blog came into existence so that I could share longer form content and share with people who are not facebook friends. It has been mostly idle for some time. Recently I’ve been looking at making more use of it. I want to write more and my circle of contacts has been pretty small over the last bunch of years and I’d like to broaden that out if possible.

I am still learning as I go. On Friday I lost the file portion of this blog (looks like an FTP GUI accident on my part) and have spent the weekend getting backup software installed and running. I expect I’ll be picking up new things on the blogging and LAMP front for the foreseeable future.

more to come on the more technical details and resources I’ve found useful…