Canceling iPower

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I swore I wouldn’t do this anymore, but here it is again. This blog is becoming the ’10 webhosts to stay away from’ mashup. I just had to put this up to let everyone know, if you are already stuck on iPower, you’re probably better off setting the account to cancel at the end of the term and just keep it until then, especially if you have less than a year left. They charge a $35 early termination fee. Here’s the transcript from when I cancelled my account: (more…)

JoshBetz.com v3.0

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For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a new website layout and here it is. The logo at the top actually goes back few months when I started a new design to incorporate my portfolio into this website, but ended up ditching the design. After a recent design job, I decided to give it another go. This time I’m very pleased with the results. I took my time, for the most part, and tried not to rush anything. In the end, I couldn’t wait to push the site live though, and it currently is not completely finished. There are probably a handful of little things to go back and finish along with the only major part of the design to finish, the portfolio page. (more…)

My Workflow: WordPress QuickPress and Recent Drafts

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Until recently I never used the drafts feature in WordPress. When I first installed WordPress 2.7 and saw the QuickPress and Recent Drafts sections on the dashboard I put them at the bottom of the page because I didn’t see why anybody would want to use that tiny editor to write a post, or why anybody would start writing a post, but then save it as a draft to be finished later, or at least any non professional writer.

In the past few weeks, however, these features have combined to help me keep my consistency going a little bit stronger.

When I’m sitting at my desk, I almost always am logged into my blog, checking stats or comments on breaks from working on whatever project I happen to be working on at the time. The dashboard really is quite good for that sort of thing. When I think of a blog post, but don’t really feel like writing it at this moment, I’ll jump down to quickpress and throw some content and a title in there. Just enough so that I remember what the point of the article was. This way I can go back later and see the list of recent drafts and decide if I want to finish off that post and finally publish it to the blog, or let it wait for another day.

Now, instead of posting two or three articles at one time and then waiting a month or 2 (or 3) to write something else, I can publish one, and start another, but wait to finish it another day. I like to think the content gets better too, when I can save it and come back to it and kind of regather my thoughts on the issue.

Side Note: This post was actually started on August 10th.

Getting two domains on one IP

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I recently had a request from someone on how to setup multiple domains on a single IP address. This is something that I’ve thought about doing before, but haven’t taken the time to stop and set it up. After getting sub-domains working, this was a breeze, as it’s the same process. I’m working on an Ubuntu server, so this may be a little different for you.

DNS

First setup the DNS, since it will probably take about an hour for that to update anyway, depending on the TTY that you use. If you’re setting this up and you want to make sure it works, you can edit your /etc/hosts file on a mac or linux machine. I think there’s a way to do this in windows as well, but I’m not sure of what file you’d be looking for. Just remember to delete that entry after you know it works.

To setup the DNS you first need to find the DNS control for the domain registrar that you use. In GoDaddy the option would be called Total DNS. Change the A record to the IP address you want to use as a server and you’re done.

Configuration

Now you need to create a new file in /etc/apache2/sites-available/. Call it whatever you want. I will call it NEWSITE.TLD. In this file you will create a new file that looks similar to this, only substituting information specific to your server:

NameVirtualHost *:80


	ServerAdmin you@your-domain.tld
	ServerName your-domain.tld

	DocumentRoot /var/www/your-root/
	
	
		Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
		AllowOverride None
		Order allow,deny
		allow from all
	

	ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log
	LogLevel warn
	CustomLog /var/log/apache/access.log combined
	ServerSignature On

Now we enable the site with:

sudo a2ensite /etc/apache2/sites-available/NEWSITE.TLD

Reload the apache configuration and you should be good to go.