Month: January 2009

A telling little change?

Posted by Shane – January 20, 2009

via: Digg

Kottke.org has an article “The country’s new robots.txt file” that shows what will hopefully be the first of many, many changes to the way the President of the United States of America executes the duties of his office.

Basically, the Bush administration was blocking search engines from finding information on the official White House website (almost 2,400 individual blocking statements). As soon as the Obama administration changed the site, all of those restrictions have been removed. Hopefully by the end of Obama’s tenure he will not find it necessary to try so hard to hide information from the people he serves.

Linux server instructions

Posted by Shane – January 20, 2009

Slicehost has some really nice tutorials and instructions for setting up a Linux server to get a website up and running. I just followed the tutorial for setting up a Ruby on Rails site being server by Apache using Passenger. If this sounds like a foreign language, well the names for software in the FOSS world can be a bit confusing but once involved in the process they become more familiar.

There are four basic steps that I followed:

1. Install and configure the server’s operating system (parts 1 & 2, Ubuntu 8.10 (aka Intrepid Ibex)
2. Install Ruby, Ruby Gems and Rails
3. Install Apache and Passenger and configure them to serve up a Rails site.
4. Make a website

Not too difficult, well, except for step #4! Ha! All told, the entire process takes about an hour (most of that spent downloading, installing and updating the software).