A Bumpy Ride To Domain Island
I’m transferring the dillfrog.com domain to another registrar, and pointing it to a different set of nameservers.
That’s geek-speak for “you’re going to have trouble accessing www.dillfrog.com for up to a week.” Don’t worry, it’ll all be over soon.
The content itself will be in transit too, but that’s proving to be a slow process (monnnnths) at my rate.
Propagating Noise
This weekend, I took some steps to move the Dillfrog Noise site to a new home. A home that doesn’t fear more than 384kbps of traffic. A home with enough square footage (or square meter..age..?) to hold losslessly-compressed audio.
It’s a relatively-unusable work-in-progress, but at least it’s in progress!
Here’s what I’ve learned so far:
- PHP appears to be the ugly child of Perl, Java, and let’s say EMACS. I say “EMACS” because it’s the first thing that comes to mind when I think of a hacked-together system with few intuitive design decisions. I’m new to PHP, and (flame-repellant) I don’t know much of EMACS either.
- Dreamhost likes to kill my processes when I don’t run them “nice -n19″. And even then, I’ve still (apparently) been a CPU hog. To their great credit, they added a feature to give “nice -n19″ apps a fair chance, after I submitted a support ticket. Major points for listening to their customers! I was running a lot of server-side FLAC -> Mp3 conversions to build the site.
- It’s easier than I expected to edit remote files without X11. See, I’m used to editing my code with “nedit” over X11, but Dreamhost doesn’t allow that. I searched around for programs that mapped SSH connections as network drives, automatically synchronized folders via FTP, etc. I found these, but none of them felt like a great idea. Eventually I realized that my already-favorite apps (WinSCP for Windows, and Cyberduck for OS X) already allow me to edit files locally and magically re-upload whenever I save them. WinSCP has been a little finicky, but Cyberduck treats me right.
I still need to clean up the UI, add graphics, build an authentication mechanism, an admin tool, AND ACTUALLY WRITE NEW SONGS, but it’s nice to see some progress.
The next challenge will be to either synchronize or move the Dillfrog account database to Dreamhost’s MySQL servers, so I can keep things personalized. Hopefully, like the Cyberduck/WinSCP example above, the solution is staring me in the face.
Help me test this out, won’tcha, and subscribe to the new Noise podcast feed.