I don 't know if this is already an episode or not, but I could really use some help with basic ...

[G+_John Stoume]

I don't know if this is already an episode or not, but I could really use some help with basic web administration.

I want to host (with a service) a blog, a link shortener, and some code repositories. Is there already a good tutorial somewhere for this, or would this be a good topic for the show?

I would appreciate any help, but if it came in the form of an episode or two, that might be helpful to others as well. 

[G+_Michael Heinz]

I'd be interested in this, too - It's changed a lot over the years; the last time I set up a server it was still a fairly manual process but these days it's all virtual servers on the cloud.

[G+_Ben Reese]

There are tons of walk-throughs for setting up a blog. I would imagine WordPress probably even has some good tutorials of their own.

 

A link shortener isn't much more than a web server with short page names and redirects setup on those pages. Pre-written code for this may take a bit longer to find than the blog, but I'm sure it's been done. This would probably be a fun project too if you just want to practice web coding.

 

A code repository depends on what you're going for. You want a website like github or bitbucket, or are you just thinking command line interface? Git is kinda the standard unless you want to go with Microsoft's Team Foundation Server (still called that?)

 

Do you have hosting? A domain name?

[G+_Michael Heinz]

Blogs are easy enough - but all the other services? I'm currently running my own email server & web server on a shared server but what I learned is 10 years old at this point.

[G+_John Stoume]

Ben Reese The repositories I want to set up are Fossil-SCM (http://www.fossil-scm.org/) and there is a hosting site for those already (http://chiselapp.com/), but I would like to be in charge of keeping my own code. 

 

I don't know much about blogging, I was just going to experiment with it and use it for site admin practice. I was thinking wordpress for that just because it is so ubiquitous.

 

I have a separate url that I want to point to the shortener, but I don't want to set up another host. So for that I need to know how to have one host handle multiple urls. (probably easy, but I don't know much about server admining).

 

I think I could get any of these things working by themselves, but I want to learn how to get them to work side by side on one host. 

edit:

I have two domain names, but I didn't pick a host yet because I don't know what i need. The domains are pointing to temporary things right now link a bit.ly custom shortener and my github page.

[G+_Ben Yanke]

Setting up a web server with a host now is relatively painless. With bluehost, the company I use, WordPress installer scripts are even included.

[G+_Michael Heinz]

There's a bit of a difference between setting up a webserver and using wordpress.

[G+_John Stoume]

My question is sort of about how to set up a basic server on a hosting service and how to get it to run whatever you would want to plug into it, not WordPress specifically.  

 

I was thinking, if I set up an instance of Debian on a host service, what do i install and how do I get it to listen for requests, send them to the right program, and send back the right response.

 

I've been looking around a bit and it looks like the first step might be to set up Apache on an old box and play with that until I know what I'm doing. Still it would be nice to have a good tutorial, especially with Fr. Robert Ballecer, SJ  doing it.  

[G+_Ben Reese]

Most of the time it's just a matter of installing the service and maybe modifying a config file. If you have 2 web servers on the same system you'll need to make sure they're listening on different ports. If you have a firewall installed you'll also need to make sure an exception is made to allow inbound traffic to that port.

[G+_Ben Reese]

If you're using Linux (probably best choice for this) and Apache, there are great tutorials for a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server setup then installing WordPress on that (such as this one for Digital Ocean but will work on other systems too: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-wordpress-on-ubuntu-14-04).

 

Speaking of Digital Ocean... There's a bitbucket education pack that comes with enough credit at Digital Ocean for 2 years of service - just have to give them your valid .edu email address.

[G+_John Stoume]

Thanks Ben Reese. I checked out that tutorial and a few others. Unfortunately my .edu email expired several years ago, but it's a good tip and hopefully someone else will find it here.

I might do some more reading through the week and try setting up a spare old box at home next weekend to play with.

[G+_Ben Reese]

A Raspberry Pi or virtual machine both work well too. Good luck and keep us posted!