Originally posted on 3/26/2008 at http://likesalmon.wordpress.com/
This is a progress report on MilhollandCycles.com, website I am building for my brother Greg, who builds bicycles in our house in Portland. His bikes are great. He built me the coolest fillet braised mountain bike that languishes in the basement while I try to save enough cash to get paint and parts on it. I think about it every day, and when the sun is out and I’m not at work it kills me that I am not mountain biking every second.
So I built Greg a theme for wordpress. It was pretty straight forward. I love wordpress. The code is elegant and extensible, and you can do whatever the hell you want to with it. I built Greg’s theme on top of the default theme that comes with the wordpress download. switch around a few php include tags and give it a new style.css document and you’re in business. I host my sites in the webserver document folder on my laptop because I can’t get virtual domains to work, but that’s another post. Anyhow, its a great testing platform because I can view the sites as they are served from the apache server on my laptop. Most of the time its just like they are live on the ‘net. Not always though. Some of the plugins (lightbox in particular) didn’t work quite right.
Thankfully when I uploaded the site to godaddy (I know what you are thinking, don’t judge me!), everything miraculously worked. Plugins, pages, everything. Except pretty URLs, that broke everything. But it wasn’t THAT hard to fix, you just have to erase all of the stuff that wordpress adds to the .htaccess file and replace it with a clean one.
The thing that vexes me is no shell access. I didn’t even think about this when choosing hosting services, but godaddy does not allow shell access. That means that you have to manipulate SQL tables with phpMyAdmin. I do not like this program. Call me old fashioned, but I prefer the hands-approach. I just don’t trust the GUI to be messing with my SQL. Maybe I shouldn’t worry about it. Wordpress has done a fine job all on its own. But I am worried. Enough so that I won’t host another site on godaddy again. Sorry.