For the more technically-minded folks, here's what this site/domain is using.

It took a long time to find the right combination that works for me. Your millage may vary.

Hey now. I like this place.

• unlimited hosting of domains/subdomains from one account.
• one-click install of SVN repository (as many as you'd like)
• ssh access
• PHP5 support – whats more is that if you don't like you they compiled it, they welcome you to roll your own and give you the script they used to compile the house version. nice!

And it's kinda really cheap too.

DokuWiki

Hey it uses files not a database! incredible!

I wrote up some notes and tips on how to use this wiki.

While DreamHost hosts my website, Google Apps hosts my mail. That's right my email XXX @ modp.com secretly is a gmail account.

I do not use all the other crap google provides: webpages, text documents, spreadsheets – none of it – it's all too MS Word97-like, which is exactly what I don't want.

The mail however works very well. If you already have a domain, and don't like your email setup you might as well switch over.

You'll see a lot of code-related links going off to code.google.com. This is where my public projects live in SVN. They don't advertise this feature, but look for "Project Hosting" in the left column menu.

Yes, the wikitext could be better and the integration with the rest of Google could be better, but you know this will all get fixed in time. Meanwhile, what they have now is quite nice and works well. They just added integration with Google Analytics so now you can see who/what/where people are downloading.

And what is you don't want to show your code to word? DreamHost has one-click set up for installing an SVN repository for you.

Hmmm, noticing a trend in what I'm using? Anyways, it's pretty simple. You add a javascripty thing, they tell who/what/when/where you site is being used by. I only use in the dumbest possible manner. I don't know how good it is for large high volume sites with real repeat visitors.

awwwww…. not everyone can be a winner. Here are some services I no longer use, mostly due to price or not needing their advanced features.

Uhhh I have to pay extra for spam filtering? FAIL. The new UI is pretty slick however. It better, it only took 3 years to do it after acquiring OddPost in 2004.

Awesome spam filtering. You control it all. And they allow imap server-side scripts, which is really cool, and all sorts of other tricks. Recommended.

svn hosting. Works well enough. They also provide Trac hosting too (bug/issue tracking).

Web hosting. Seemed to be fine, but a bit expensive. They have the advantage of being in Pittsburg, which is free of disasters, natural (earthquakes, hurricanes) or man-made (power outages).

Sorry , WordPress. While the admin interface and install is quite impressive, I had some major problems with it. Mostly because I tried to use it as a CMS and not a blog.

The editor appears to have a WYSIWYG vs. Raw HTML Code interface. Except the raw code is not the raw code. It muxes with everything in an attempt to make "valid XHTML" and some other unspecified rules (like "divs are not allowed" – why?), to the point I had to go into the source code and cripple various parts of it. This wasted about a day and was questioning my sanity until I found I was not alone. Not only that. The formating.php code appears to using a bunch of regexps instead of actually parsing the data. So by using the "raw code editor" I was still able to make invalid xhtml.

The other problem I had is the API. Don't try to do a query to look up some other information before showing the main page since all state will be lost. Whoops! This turned out to be a problem since I wanted to make a right hand side bar showing recent posts, except by looking up the information I destroyed the page content. Either give me a query I can run OR give me the data, but don't give me a global result set from the database.

And finally most of the default themes I thought were technically horrible. Globs and globs of whitespace, multiple line-ending types, uneven use of tabs and spaces. Functionally this didn't matter, they all work and look great. It just makes it hard to learn how to user and edit themes.

Oops almost forgot this. The "textualize" function also uses blind regexs, so anything is a <pre> … </pre> block is mangled and quotes, –, etc are replaced with fancy html entities. BAD.

I attempted to look at the queries the themselves, but they are so abstracted, I gave up. And the code is mostly not documented. Seems like the post schema is quite complicated too for reason unknown.

That said, wordpress has a lot of users, so it must work for a lot of people. Just not for me. Once I get my wiki working, I may use it as a true-blog later on.

Since I'm ranting and raving, can I make a plea to all blog engine users to consider using http://sqlite.org instead of mysql? And for php5 to start supporting sqlite3 thanks!