Lately there has been quite a stir at my job regarding WordPress. In this we have played alot with deployment methods, including proxying it through another application to add an extra layer of features. Because of all of this I have had quite a few conversations with teammates about the easiest way to set up a new blog. As I feel I have a very quick and easy way to not only install a new WordPress installation, but also to keep it up to date, I figured I would share it here, in case that knowledge might be helpful to someone else.

A quick warning first, while nothing I am about to describe is necessarily difficult nor hazardous, all of it requires that you have some sort of direct access to your server. In the case of my explanations, I will be speaking of doing this through an SSH terminal connection. Some familiarity and access to Subversion is also needed. Mostly, this is a solution that should appeal to other developers.

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No one can deny the effect that Google has had over how we use computers in the last decade. In the beginning it started with a simpler home page, one less burdened by the clutter that other search engine’s provided. From search it moved to dominate the web advertising with it’s Adsense program that provides relevant marketing to web pages and the ever-changing content of the web. They sought to change the face of e-mail first by giving you a simpler way to organize and manage your in-box. They also looked to offer free online tools to write and manage documents that were more traditionally handled by expensive word processors. More recently they have sought to change the face of e-mail and general communication again, with their newest beta product Wave.

These are only a small number of the growing projects that Google has in its labs. Lesser known to some has been Google’s dabbling in building its own operating systems and browser. It started with mobile phone platform known as Android that has taken the developer and general geek communities by storm, promising a truly open platform in the ever-growing mobile universe. This was a complete affront to the blossoming Apple iPhone movement, which while exploding, is somewhat plagued by sense that big brother is always watching and stifling innovation. The promise from Google was that it wanted to facilitate innovation by providing a truly open alternative for the traditionally very closed mobile market.

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Gentoo

A little while back I discussed my (at the time) recent purchase of an Acer H340 Windows Home Server. At that time I was just getting into ripping my DVDs into x264 / DIVX formatted video files. At about 1.5-gigabyte per movie, it seemed like it would take me forever to fill up the 4-terabytes of space the server afforded me. I figured by the time that happened storage would be more dense and a new, similar solution would be available to replace my “aging” H340 server. Of course, as usual, I underestimated my enthusiasm in filling the device. See, shortly after I began this project I started modifying what I was filling my library with.

With my discovery of the PS3MediaServer package, I found serenity in being able to transcode higher resolution rips. Now all the sudden a whole new world of ripped 720p and 1080p BluRay media opened to me. This of course went great for a while. I was able to watch all sorts of great movies on my nice LCD TV in uber high-resolution and my little media server was chugging away, doing its best to keep up with all the transcoding I threw its way. Soon, the 2-terabytes that drive duplication afforded me filled up, so I deduplicated my TV show archive and made my way to 3 -terabytes. Which I of course filled equally fast.

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