The Hardware
I just built a MicroATX system for my blog, and other projects, to live on.
The specs:
- Kingston 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800
- Intel Pentium E5200 Wolfdale 2.5GHz 2MB L2 Cache
- Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L LGA 775 Intel G31 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
- Apevia X-QPACK-NW-BK/420 Black Case
- Random Samsung 250GB Hard Drive
Here are a couple of shots from the full gallery:
The Software
I’ve traditionally always had some kind of built-from-scratch blog growing up, but lately I’ve been experimenting with various blogs. At first I was restricted to blog software written in ASP.net because my hosting was on a Windows machine, but now my blog has moved to my machine! On Windows, I was using Subtext. It wasn’t bad, and it got the job done. There were a fair amount of themes available, which was important because I didn’t want to invest myself in a particular project by writing my own theme. It was pretty unpolished though, primarily the Admin interface. It seemed to have gaps of missing features (and it was homely).
With the luxury of running my own server, it was logical to try WordPress. It’s better in every dimension. There’s a massive userbase which means several things: it can be coaxed to do anything, millions of plugins, lots of support, and it’s easy to google solutions to any problem you run into.
With WordPress up and running, my first priority was to find a good theme and photo gallery. The theme was easy to find, but finding a good photo gallery was a journey. For the photo gallery I tried the following plugins: photoJAR, Lightbox 2, WPG2, and NextGEN. They were all impossible or unreasonably difficult to customize the way I wanted except for NextGEN. For tweaking I recommend looking at the NextGEN Gallery.
