Yeah, though I walked in the shadow of the valley of death, still would I fear no evil, even though no support staff comforted me.
Spent a long Friday installing Movable Type on my LAN server: downloaded, installed and tested Perl. Hooked Perl to the Personal Web Server so it would run .CGI files as Perl scripts. Located and installed Perl packages for MySQL access (mysteriously missing from the 5.8 distribution binaries) and for Image Magick. Downloaded, configured and installed Movable Type, a Perl-based blogging software package with 14 pages of installation procedure: a touch daunting for someone with zero experience of Perl.
All this software is open-source and free, which is wonderful, but which also means no support staff. I restrained my nagging suspicion that only Perl programmers and Unix undergraduates could find their way through this work. The software is widely used. MT, for example, has user forums. The Installation thread there has over 6,000 posts with over 24,000 replies. Is this comforting or worrying? Turned out that with online documentation, searchable user forums and Google, I was able to resolve every problem, including the ones I introduced myself. By 1am Sat I had the MT web management screen visible on another machine on my LAN.
But why ontology? This summer I distinguished that my timidity disinclined me to try new technology, expecting frustration but no results. In contrast, technical people I admire seem free to dive into, review, summarise, exploit new technologies. More traces of my catastrophe monkey. So I resolved to adventure into new programming languages and technologies.
This autumn I've been getting results with PHP, Ruby, MySQL, Regular Expressions, RSS, XHTML, pure CSS layouts, Blogger, text editors NoteTab and SciTE -- and now Perl and Movable Type.
Once again, the future is a secret. The adventure continues.
Posted by SJT at December 7, 2003 08:41 PMThanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
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