OMNINOGGIN

I apologize if you have visited earlier today and found the Maintenance-Mode screen. I was moving this blog from a self-hosted dedicated server to a shared-hosting server. In this post, I will discuss the reasons for my decision and the switching experience.
Here are some reasons why I made the switch (Pros):

1. I’ve been getting more readers lately so my bandwidth was almost reaching capacity. Shared-hosting is the cheapest way to get decent burstable bandwidth.
2. I wanted to start focusing more on WordPress and less on FreeBSD. Making this switch will alleviate me from having to maintain/troubleshoot low-level system things, leaving me with more time to focus on WordPress development & discussion.

Read on…

Over the past few months, I’ve been meaning to create a staging WordPress blog that is an exact replica of my production OMNINOGGIN blog so I can test major feature changes before releasing them to my production site.  I have to admit that there are many other interesting things to spend time on (see also: Make Popularity Contest Work with WP-Super-Cache and NowThen Photo Display WordPress Plugin) so I have been lagging at getting this task done.  Fortunately the WordPress 2.5 released was enough to motivate me to get this done.  My goal in this post is to provide a step-by-step set of instructions (or checklist) for getting this task done.  I run Apache 2.2.8, MySQL 5.0.51a, and PHP 5.2.5 on a FreeBSD 7.0 machine that I have complete control over.  Keep in mind that these steps will vary depending on how your blog is configured.  It is a good checklist nonetheless so without further ado:

Read on…

In the previous post, I found out that it takes 150W to power my personal computer which I always leave on the entire day. I felt bad that I am not contributing to the “Go Green & Save the planet” cause. I actually use my person computer for a variety of things throughout the day but there was definitely a way to optimize the usage. Here are tasks that require my computer to be on all the time:

1. File Server (mainly used for backups)
2. Torrents
3. PVR System
4. Personal FTP Server (mainly used for syncing settings with my work computer)
5. MyCast Orb Sharing

I immediately saw that I can give up MyCast Orb Sharing, since I haven’t used it for months. Read on…

Previously, I mentioned that I was not able to successfully send emails via sendmail. This functionality is quite useful because WordPress, among other things, uses sendmail to send emails to you when someone leaves a comment on your post. So it turns out that because most public mail servers (i.e. gmail, hotmail, etc) do not trust my “omninoggin.com” mail server domain, all messages I sent were refused. After hours of research, I found out that I can route my mail traffic through my internet service provider’s mail proxy (SBC Yahoo!) to get this to work. Read on…