Free Hosting???
Posted on February 19, 2002
Today, I was looking for some options for setting up a website for clinic where I work. I went to the department’s designated IT contact, told him about what I wanted to do, and asked him about the options. He said the department as a whole had a web account with the University, but he thought the best bet would be to add webpage privileges to my account. We talked a bit about it and he mentioned he thought every staff member or student was allowed 10-20 megs of space for their own personal websites. More than enough for what I was planning. He told me how to get the privileges added to my account and where to get more information on what is involved in the setup and hosting. I went ahead and got the privileges added, and I looked into what they had to offer.
From what I saw, they have Apache (good) 1.2 (oh, well), PHP, and Perl. The site didn’t mention anything about SQL or databases in general. I sent an email regarding this to someone who hasn’t gotten back to me yet. However, I did see one thing that took me by complete surprise – they allow up to 100 megs and they have the option of domain hosting!!! That blew my mind.
Of course, I haven’t looked at their service agreement, but at least it’s available to look at. I also haven’t gone and looked at the specifics of it, but on the face, it seems like a great deal. I guess you could call it a perk of the job (from my geeky point-of-view, at least).
What happens to this also depends on things like what the service agreement says (i.e. restrictions), and what kind of databases they have, if any. I don’t see why they wouldn’t though, because they also offer ecommerce/shopping cart and search, which I would think would require some type of RDBMS to work.
Baby Steps, redux
Posted on February 17, 2002
Some more info on the state of gottahavacuppamocha. The previous version was considered (by me) to be 0.9. In other words, it was close to being able to go live, but not 100% what I wanted to put out there. Now I think I’m on version 0.92 (or 0.9.1, depending on how you want to count). This weekend I downloaded version 5.5 of PHP-Nuke, and I spent much more time working on the update than I intended. I can think of a ton of reasons why it took so long. Most of them are my fault. Anyway, I finally moved the whole version 0.9 gottahavacuppamocha to a backup directory (moved the database, too) and did a clean install. After that, it was just a matter of spending some time moving files and copying the info from the backup database to the new one (that you phpMyAdmin and Opera).
In other news here on the site, I also got the first fully functioning gottahavacuppamocha theme. It’s called ExtraLite and it’s one of the PHP-Nuke standard themes. I just used the Nuke logo as a template and made my own gottahavacuppamocha logo – well, banner because gottahavacuppamocha requires a lot of space to write. If you want to check it out, set your theme to ExtraLite. Hopefully, I will be able to modify the other standard themes fairly quickly as well.
Finally, I added (or will add, after I finish writing this) some more topics for the articles.
I looked at the offer Earthlink has for a static IP DSL, but I found their information a little short on details. They say the static IP is ideal for home office users and gamers (especialy those gamers who want to set up their own server). What they didn’t mention was wheteher it was okay to host my own domain name. I guess I’ll have to find out about that.
That’s all for tonight.
Blender stuff
Posted on February 10, 2002
Yesterday, I went and bought a book called “The Art of 3D Computer Animation and Imaging,” (see the Reviews Section for more on that), and it gave me some additional motivation to get off my butt and work some on Blender. So today I worked with it a bit and I added some Blender files to the downloads section, and added the appropriate images to the downloads area of eGallery. I also added a tutorial to the Blender Forum. I have a few goals with Blender, some of which will involve this site. First, I want to make a library of sorts of Blender objects that I can cut and paste between scenes to use as props. There is already a lot of this on other websites for programs such as Poser and 3D Studio. Since I finally figured out how to cut and paste between Blender files, this makes it more worthwhile.
As far as the site goes, I want to add tutorials, if for no other reason than it will help me remember how to do certain things in Blender, and it also helps me a bit to put these things in my own words to reinforce the idea in my head…if that makes sense.
I also plan on adding the library of Blender files to the downloads section. This will pass on what I have to others, and hopefully, it will encourage others to do the same. I will also add pictures of what I produce to the eGallery section, so people who want to download something can see what it looks like before they download it.
And finally, I want to do the logo and/or themes for this site in Blender, so this provides additional motivation
