Creating this blog was exponentially more painful than I even anticipated, hopefully me detailing what I did will make it easier for someone else out there.
First, I was totally intending to use Sharepoint for the blog. Being an MS kinda guy, I thought that was a no-brainer. I still intend on doing this, but am waiting for my new server to arrive (although I have found a great place to start once I get there).
So, Sharepoint is out temporarily, what's next? The most popular blog format that I have seen is Community Server. I first thought that I was going to have to shell out some hard earned cash for it, but this was not the case. Downloading was totally free, albeit with their logo at the bottom of the page (a small price to pay).
Installing was a cakewalk. This is running on a SBS 2003 SP1 machine, the only caveat was that I needed to install the latest version of .NET to get it going. Once that was done, I made some fundamental errors, which in hindsight, were totally avoidable.
Mainly, ALWAYS write your blog posts in Word first and save them locally - the previous post is in it's 5th version, because of numerous deletes and reinstalls of Community Server.
The deletes and reinstalls were primarily down to aesthetics problems. I wanted this site to open immediately when you went to http://kieran.block.net.au. The closest that I got (before the last time) was getting it to work when you went to http://kieran.block.net.au/cs. This was down to an altercation between me and Community Server, which has since been resolved.
The real trick with getting this to run a blog on the root directory is here -> http://qgyen.net/archive/2006/07/14/Qgyen.ExtendedUrlMapping-for-CS-v2.1.aspx
This was simple to install, and to get running. The only thing that I noticed (which isn't listed anywhere) is that you need to run IISReset after you have made the changes.
The process from start to finish is as follows;
- Download Community Server
- Install Community Server
- Get it to create a new site in the wizard
- Get it to install CS in the root of that site
- Set it up and test it
- Configure your host headers and ports in IIS
- Test it
- Install the changes required from here
- Test it
- Start dumping your content into it!
Now that I have it all working, I am in a bit of a quandry. I have a heap of pre-written guides and technical articles that were going to go on my commercial website - should I drop them all on here in the next few days? If I do, then the blog will look stale with no recent content (although, that is unlikely considering Exchange 2007 will be out any minute now). If I don't I am left with a pretty boring blog :)
Oh well, I have disabled comments so am going to have to sort this out myself - time will tell
Kieran
Right, so I got my blog up and running on my SBS machine, fighting tooth and nail to get it to happen, and then made the fatal mistake of telling people about it...
It then became blatantly obvious that my link was by no means up to hosting any kind of website, and was inflicting horrendous load times of up to 20 seconds!
So, it was time for a little bit of outsourcing. With zero research into the matter, I decided that GoDaddy was the place to be - I have dealt with them before, and knew that they were reasonably (if not fantastically) priced.
$10 per month later, I have 100GB of space at my disposal, and load times that are very reasonable (well inside the 4 second window).
My lack of research then decided to kick me in the face, when I found out that installing CommunityServer onto GoDaddy was akin to licking a watermelon into shape.
Fortunately, this guide was absolutely perfect, and worked with only one slight hiccup. You cannot have Frontpage Extensions AND CommunityServer running on the same hosting plan (GoDaddy uncooly force all sites and subsites in the same plan to use the same settings).
The only other thing to note, if you want to blog to be at the root of the site, the previous DLL that I used (below) will not work with GoDaddy. You will need to use this
So, blog works, company website doesn't (search, contact and TOC). That is fine though, I am content with rebuilding them in ASP or leaving them out entirely - it just adds to the snowballing project that is my website!
Kieran