Come ride with me through the veins of history
Hey everybody who’s on my RSS feed (all 4 of you), I’m sorry If I spammed your feed with all of my posts being reposted. I just moved my WordPress to a new server, which should be faster and better. This will also let me get updates from WordPress faster, since I’m now running Debian Testing instead of Ubuntu for my server.
All in all, it should be a better experience for all of us. Thanks!
Ha ha!
I FINALLY got www.shadeball.org to redirect to http://shadeball.org. And you know how I finally ended up doing, after days of strife and anger and stupidity?
sudo ln -s /etc/wordpress/config-shadeball.org.php /etc/wordpress/config-www.shadeball.org.php
Thats all. 10 seconds, and it was fixed. UGH
Alright. I’ve finally got my new WordPress site up and running. I switched from Drupal to WordPress because WordPress looks better, and it does the things I want to do built in instead of having to work at it for a long time with Drupal. Drupal’s a great piece of software, but its not what I need right now. Its actually kind of similar to my switch from Debian to Ubuntu. I really liked Debian, but I finally got sick of taking hours to do the things that Ubuntu does built in. Yeah, I’m sacrificing some freedom, but its mine to sacrifice.
But yeah. I had to install WordPress three different times, because I’m bad at life. The first time I installed it on my Debian server, but I had somehow borked up my MySQL and couldn’t figure out how to fix it so I just installed a Ubuntu server. Then I got everything up and running and working well, until I changed an option that tried to redirect everything to www.shadeball.org, which isn’t supported right now(although I’m trying to fix that).
Here’s what I needed to do to get my custom domain name from GoDaddy working with this WordPress instance on an Ubuntu 9.04 server. After installing and setting up WordPress, which was mostly easy, I needed to get this custom domain name working as well. The first thing that I needed to do was to edit my /etc/hosts file. When I installed Ubuntu, I just okey’d the default networking settings, which set my domain name as nc.rr.com. So I had to change that to shadeball.org, to match this website. I also changed the IP address in the hosts file from 127.0.1.1, a loopback address, to its real local address, 192.168.1.105. To finish the /etc/hosts file part, I ran these two commands: echo grainger.shadeball.org > /etc/hostname and /etc/init.d/hostname.sh start. Then I needed to change the settings of my Apache webserver. The first thing that I changed was the document root, so that it was actually serving up my WordPress site instead of placeholder “It works!” that is in the default installation of any Apache webserver. After I changed the document root to “/usr/share/wordpress”, I had to add the ServerName and ServerAlias fields so that it would actually run as “shadeball.org” and “www.shadeball.org”. So I added: ServerName shadeball.org ServerAlias www.shadeball.org into the top of the VirtualHost area. This actually doesn’t work, so far as I can tell, with WordPress. I want to figure out how to get it so www.shadeball.org does actually redirect to shadeball.org, but I haven’t figured it out yet (and borked my server trying). To make my site accessible to the world, I only needed to change a few more things, all in my GoDaddy DNS settings. In the “Total DNS Control and MX Records” page, I changed the Host to the IP address of my server, and changed the “www” alias to “shadeball.org”. And then that was that!
This will prove useful for me if/when I ever install a new server, and I hope it can be useful to anyone else installing a server. I couldn’t find a really simple explanation of how to get a custom domain name working on a personal server.