Once upon a time, A Better Geek was powered by WordPress. I got sick of how fiddly maintaining MySQL (aka MariaDB) actually was, and I've rebuilt my server using Dokuwiki to power a number of sites.

I'm still migrating content from my old blog to the new wiki. Below are changelog posts from the old WordPress blog.

I spent the better part of today redesigning the site. The new WP 2.7 interface kind of motivated me to revamp things.

Let me know what you think, if you find something broken, etc.

It’s been more than a month since I last posted.

Sorry about that.

I’m going to be working on a new project that involves Twitter (likely in PHP, so that I can run it from ABetterGeek.com), so I may post some insights into that in the near future.

I don’t intend for this to be a dead site; it’s just hard to keep up with regular writing. I need more to talk about. Politics, maybe. And religion. And some lawyer jokes for good measure.

In the unlikely event that anyone is reading this blog, things are going to go offline sometime in the near future, once GoDaddy finishes transferring my domain to my new registrar (aplus.net).

Lesson learned from this experience: GoDaddy sucks. A lot. Their interface is terrible, they only have long-distance phone support, the level of communication involving even doing this transfer was unbelievably bad, and I am never going to use them for anything again.

I’ve been hosting A Better Geek on someone’s DreamHost space since I started the site. I’ve since discovered that, while free hosting is nice, having control over everything is worth a little cash every month.

Server virtualization has started to really revolutionize the web hosting industry. Now, instead of sharing resources with thousands of others on a single box, you get a little mini-server all to yourself, complete with godlike control (aka root access).

What’s most amazing is how cheap this stuff has become. I ended up going with Linode VPS (virtual private server) hosting. For $20 a month, I get 12GB storage, 360MB RAM, and 200GB bandwidth (which, apparently is a soft cap – not sure what’ll happen if I go over!). But, best of all, it’s all mine. I went with Ubuntu 8.10 LTS, running the ever-present Apache/PHP/MySQL configuration. I have things that your typical shared hosting providers don’t provide without extra fees, like SSH and SFTP. I could run a WoW or IRC server if I wanted.

Needless to say, I’m quite happy with my move. I’ll have to figure out what kind of fun things I want to do with it!

Here it is. I finally got around to installing WordPress.

Now, before you judge me for not using a more advanced CMS/blogging engine, or writing my own template for this thing, allow me to speak on my own behalf.

I work full time, and at the moment I’m trying to finish a web application by 9:00 AM tomorrow. I don’t really have the time to do much advanced stuff with this right now.

I’ll get around to writing a proper introduction at some point, but in the meantime, there’s this:

My name is Claire. I’m a girl, I’m 23, and I work at Purdue University in West Lafayette, IN as a web developer. We mostly work in Adobe ColdFusion and Microsoft SQL Server, although some stuff is done in PHP or ASP.NET (ew), and minimal stuff is done with MySQL instead of MSSQL.

I already have a personal journal (no, you can’t have the link). I’m hoping that I can use this for something a little more about the real world. We’ll see how it works – historically, trying to manage two blogs doesn’t work, at least for me.

Welcome!