Friday, November 23, 2007

New ways of getting to the same place

It all started when my server at home started acting up. It happened about the same time that a new version of my server's operating system came out. I use Ubuntu Linux. Rather than try to fix the problem with the server I decided I would do a complete reinstall of Ubuntu and in the process upgrade everything to the latest version.

But reinstalling the server meant there would be a day or so of down time. So I decided to move ipsoSacto to a commercial server where I rent space. The idea was that this would be transparent and there would be no downtime.

I've been building web sites for many years and I've moved from commercial server to commercial server. I should have known that something that worked perfectly well on my Ubuntu server at home wouldn't work on the commercial server. These commercial servers always turn off some feature I'm using. It is always a different one. It is always for security reasons.

Anyway, it was only after I installed everything on the commercial server that I discovered that I couldn't do my trick with the Google Reader shared pages. Big security problem, the commercial server rep said.

As a result I had to figure out a different way to do the same thing. Turns out it wasn't that difficult; just annoying.

Now ipsoSacto is back working as before. If it is not, let me know.