Art Attack Central

Fixing stuff, myself included…

Well… so two years gobye bye and here I am.

So how did you get here?

I googled mentalrollerderby to see if it was still around and found a link to the Testzone. Anyway it would be good to start blogging again, I’m really not a Facebook kind of gal.
Why not Facebook; you’re on it?

Yeah, I’m on it, but I don’t pay attention to it much. I’ve got so many other things I want to figure out. Facebook seems trivial to me. There I said it. I’d much rather struggling with the Snow Leopard install on the old P4.
“Designated driver, on the information highway.”

Once Again…

I’ve been gone again for so long there’s been a WordPress version update.

Oh screw it! Why don’t you just post and forget the damn update for now? Update yourself instead.

Yeah! Finally got Snow Leopard running on my Shuttle SG31G2. Spent the better part of the summer trying to get the developer Snow to install on my latest P4. It would not. Once the actual DVD was released on Aug. 28th, the OSx86 scene exploded with information. Armed with that new data, I set the P4 aside and without “too much” trouble hacked it for the Shuttle. This afternoon I’m fooling around with the P4 once more.

Adding Posts


Setting up tags and catagories for posts.

Finish formating the posts themselves.

Removing comment tags.

Art Attack Updated!

cssvalid

W3css

Yes, finally. After talk, talk, talk  it doesn’t stretch with browser size changes, and it’s valid CSS and XHTML. I have for the time being retained its retro look. Now I must figure out how to make my design work in WordPress. All of the site would remain static except the Blog page, which would replace/incorporate the Art Attack About page. In other words, that’s the only page that would have the post loop, but it would look just like the rest of my site. And more/most important it will be the only page that can be changed via the WordPress dashboard.

Why?

Content Management.

When things go bad…

Yep, today on local machine WordPress could not find the database. Damn!

So what did you do?

Spent about an hour figuring out that the my.cnf file maybe should be my.conf. Now I have both of these files in the same directory and changed named host in Apache to “localhost.” Not sure if that was necessary. Once again ran the sym link, because although MySQL was running, it didn’t know where/which socket. I do hope when I reboot tomorrow it’s not the same crap happening.

What else did you do today?

Made some changes to the artattackcentral design.  I scraped the 3 container + transparent art work design, but “what the hell” by spending time on that design I have a better understanding of the CSS box/container configuration.

Setting-up Development Environment

I’ve just finished (once again=almost a year later) setting up Apache, PHP, MySQL and WordPress on my intelMac. If I’d thought more about it before setting up on the intelMac, I would have set up on the PPC MDD Mac.

How come?

I guess because, I’m a nervous Nell when it comes to my PC=Mac. In some ways it’s own environment seems fragile. It makes me queasy when I have to use the -f boot arg., and even more sick when she boots and has no dock and menu. However, mostly she’s pretty good, and when she’s terrible I use the OSx86 tools to fix the permissions. I do wonder if I might be better off with the voodoo kernel, but that’s another story…

What’s entailed with getting the development environment up and running?

Since it’s been so long ago, of course I’d forgotten some of the details.

  1. PHP is already installed so that’s a matter of finding the Apache2 directory (found in /etc), opening the httpd.conf file in terminal as sudo (root) and removing the # (comment) in front of “LoadModule php5_module.”
  2. Apache obviously is already installed (see #1 above). It needs to be turned on and can be turned on via Preferences/Sharing/Web Sharing. Apache can also be turned on and off in the terminal = “sudo apachectl graceful.”
  3. MySQL is a PITA!, and I spent 6 hrs. trying to install the latest binary and/or source MSQL. Finally I “compiled” a variety of internet information sources/URLs that allowed me to install the plain old dmg file without problems. When I say, “without problems” I mean without significant problems.

So what happened with the MySQL install?

To begin with the start/stop preference pane doesn’t work in Leopard. So MySQL must be started via the terminal. Also PHP “thinks” MySQL is installed in a different directory so a sym link must be created, or the php.ini file must be edited. I chose the sym link method.

Where’s WordPress in this geeky menagerie?

Ah yes, WordPress “the 7th day” of open source CMS in the mess. Once everything else (PHP, Apache, MySQL), is working download the latest WordPress and let the fun begin. Extract the files in /Library/WebServer/Documents. In the brower call up http://localhost/wordpress (or whatever you want to name the folder the files reside in) wp-admin/install.php. If all has been done correctly you should be able to install WordPress.

Well… was it all working?

All is working; so now I can begin figuring out how WordPress can/is being used as a CMS. It seems WordPress is PHP, but not really > See this: Matt’s Explaination. I decided not to go with the virtual hosts, and multi blogs on one WordPress install this time, because last year I got sidetracked trying to make that work perfectly before entering the CMS realm.