This is my page and I’ve decided it will be … where I talk about stuff and play with new features of this website.

September 2009

I’ve just upgraded this site from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6, and I’ve also installed FCKEditor and IMCE to handle content editing. In Drupal 5 I used TinyMCE but I could never get the inline image functions to work well. FCKEditor + IMCE seem to handle inline images very well.

October 2009

I’ve also migrated the website to a new server. Recently I built myself a new PC so my old PC is the new webserver: DFI LANPARTY UT nF3 Ultra-D mobo, AMD64 CPU, 1GB RAM, Ubuntu server 9.04 Jaunty. Running headless via Webmin on another home network PC. So far so good.

March 2013

My old DFI mobo eventually got the heebies so I bought an HP ProLiant N40L Microserver. I also got sick of maintaining Drupal so I’ve gone with WordPress this time. Our site is blog-like so I may as well go with a system that makes that easy. I’m still using Ubuntu (12.10) with lubuntu as a GUI and webmin for day to day maintenance.

September 2013

I tried auto-update but it didn’t work, so I added define('FS_METHOD','direct'); to wp-config.php
[see http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/update-wordpress-without-ftp/ ] to avoid ftp. I’m not sure it really worked so I updated manually. I then tried to auto-update the plug-ins which again didn’t work do I changed-ownership of the wp install to www-data (naughty, I know), which worked. I’ll see how auto-update goes next time.

June 2020

I’ve still got the HP ProLiant N40L after 7 years. It’s now running Lubuntu 20.04 with PHP 7.4 and WordPress 5.4, and webmin for routine admin. Our photo albums for 2007 – 2012 were running on Plogger which is no longer being developed and can’t run on PHP7, so I’ve loaded the photos into NexGen galleries.

June 2023

I decided to install a NAS at home and run as much as possible on that. For years I had been using my main PC for various home network functions, such as a Plex server and as a repository of documents and photos made available to the rest of the home network. But leaving my PC on 24/7 is expensive. The HP server makes a fine web server and file server but isn’t adequate for Plex or photo management or the use of Docker. So I bought a Synology NAS. The hardware seems expensive but it comes with a well-designed and maintained operating system (DSM) and software suite. It will provide ‘cloud’ document and photo storage for the family, and perform as a Plex server, web server and local backup destination.