I finally gave into the temptation to write a web-log that’s somewhat less antiquated than my old Advogato one.
A few notes about the infrastructure behind the blog. In the space of twenty minutes, I had Lighttpd, MySQL, PHP and Wordpress installed and configured.
daemontools
DJB’s daemontools software supervises djbdns, mysqld and lighttpd. If a daemon dies, daemontools re-starts it. The environment under which each deamon is run no longer depends on whether it was started at boot-time, by running the init script or by hand. Is good.
mysql
Because I chose to use daemontools, I was able to scrap the crufty mysqld_safe wrapper that usually makes a half-arsed attempt at supervising mysqld.
lighttpd
Apache is great, but lighttpd is so much simpler. The Debian package comes with a chunk of config you can drop in, to allow PHP. However, I had problems with Wordpress permalinks due to the $_SERVER['PATH_INFO'] variable being empty. This was fixed by setting cgi.fix_pathinfo=1 in the php.ini file.
Wordpress
I didn't have any good reason for choosing Wordpress other than that it was the first item I saw when I searched Google for personal blogging software. I'm a mite worried about its security but we'll see how it goes. (That reminds me, must turn on safe-mode again…). I picked a moderately clean-looking theme and I've only hacked it in parts; most visibly, to put up a different photo.