Martin Baines Blog

Fun Puzzle

I found this on a friend of a friend’s Facebook page and thought I would share it.

Explain the following geometric anomaly

No prizes but a sense of smugness for the best answer.

About this blog

This blog will probably always remain a bit of a work in progress. In the past I have had a few blogs hosted on other systems and I started to wonder what effort would be involved in running one more hands on myself. Why should one go to that bother? Well for me it was mainly about learning more of what is involved but also from a desire to be able to be freer in what content appears and to be certain of copyright. The public web services that support blogging like “Blogger” and “Windows Live Spaces” certainly make publishing easy but they also come with pages of terms and conditions about what you can and cannot post and many also water down your copyright by either claiming sole or joint republishing rights over what appears. Whilst I don’t intend to publish anything illegal or shocking I certainly will feel more comfortable not having to worry if a given picture or comment might fall foul of someone’s terms and conditions. As for copyright - I just feel I want to solely own what I publish and not have it appear somewhere else later making money for a big corporation.

So having thought about this over a few days of holiday (vacation if you speak American) I decided to investigate what was involved. I already own the domain the site is now hosted on, and have a basic home page up already so choice of a hoster was more or less a done deal. I use www.easyspace.com more by historic accident of getting a good price a few years ago than any real rational thought process. More about them and their service later. Not surprisingly there is a huge amount of blogging software to choose from but it quickly became clear WordPress was the market leader and received generally favourable reviews. It’s open source meaning there were no charges and is based on the ubiquitous PHP and MySQL both of which I already have support for from my hoster so that was in its favour too. Since I work for Microsoft I am sure some people (including probably most of my colleagues) will argue I should have opted for an ASP.NET based solution and they have a point. Since my site was already PHP based from before my days at Microsoft it was an easy option though as well as enabling me to keep in touch with the non-Microsoft world. Choosing a market leader also has the big advantage of being well supported by other tools - including it turns out Microsoft’s own blog editor Windows Live Writer. One final Microsoft point too: of course these days Windows Server 2008 is possibly the best platform to host PHP and MySQL on.

So having chosen WordPress what was it like to install? In an ideal world it would be trivial: there are even hosters that do it in one click for you (see www.wordpress.org for more details) but sadly this is where EasySpace rather let me down. The latest version of WordPress is 2.7.1 at the time of writing so I duly downloaded it and followed the steps to an install. This is really easy - just fill in the name of your MySQL server in one config file, set up a secret key then put all the files on your server. After that it is a trivial install process - you just open one page on the server and it does the install for you. One step nothing more.

Up to this point all seemed to go really well, the install seemed to take quite a while but it came back with a success message plus the autogenerated admin password. The “home” page of the blog also seemed to be generated ok but any attempt to access anything else on the site just resulted in a hang. My hoster provides a very basic service for managing the site so there were no diagnostics to look at or anything else to help work out what was happening. Now I knew from previous history that EasySpace are not exactly good at being on the curve with latest versions of software and both their MySQL and PHP instances are one major release behind what is current. They also use Zeus web server software rather than the more common Apache which was another area of suspicion. A brief web search revealed a couple of other people who had problems with EasySpace and WordPress – in fact one was very, very strong in his wording about their service or lack of. Luckily one of the other contributors has been through the loop before me and discovered that the older version of WordPress (2.6.5) worked ok. So then it was just a matter of blatting the database tables (not quite a trivial exercise as between my last use of their server and now EasySpace disabled remote access to the MySQL server so I had to install myPHPadmin just to do that – also an old rev as the current one needs a newer version of PHP than EasySpace support) and reinstalling.

Success. It all worked like a dream. WordPress it turns out is a very flexible and easy to use platform and once installed posting is no harder than on something like Blogger. There are dozens of free templates and plugins to let you customise the look and feel of the site too and so far I have only just scratched its surface.

So 9 out of 10 for WordPress (would have been 10 out of 10 but for lack of the install spotting it would not work) and 3 out of 10 for EasySpace.