Over the next few days, I'll be documenting the way I have set up Moveable Type to imitate Radio User Land. The main goal is to achieve the following:
This will create a proper environment for creating and publishing content. The next step is to integrate MT with an RSS Aggregator (Ampheta Desk) so that I can more easily cross-post the feeds that I am reading. This may require some tricky Perl programming, but I believe that it can be done.
The first step in reaching these goals is to describe how to install MT from scratch. To get there, I have to describe some issues concerning Hosting, DNS, Web Servers, CGI, and URLs.
I finished an installation of MT today, but it was a bit of a run-around. The documentation gave me a hint, but the thing is such an ocean to dive into that I was lost for a while. Fortunately, I have written systems that have similar capabilities, so I was able to recognize the issues that needed to be solved and solve them. I'll be scrapping the installation several times and scripting all the steps I took to get to a functioning install. I'll be setting it up to meet my goals (described above), so there should be a decent amount of explanation along the way about why you'd want to do everything the way I suggest.
The goal of this whole saga is not to make anyone who reads it into a system administrator or a webmaster. It is to generate a more abstract kind of knowledge about the critical semantics at the technical level that make MT easy to use for regular users. Right now it is hard to see how any regular user could possibly struggle through the process.
Let me also state up front that I am doing this on a Red Hat Linux 8.0 installation, on a Dual Pentium-II 400Mhz machine. The initial description will be in terms of that, but I presume that anyone using the same Open-Source and Free-Ware tools ought to be able to do the same. I'm hoping that on Win32, you'd at least be able to use Cygwin to do everything. I hear that on Mac OS X Perl is installed a bit differently, so I'd like to ultimately compile all the instructions necessary to accomodate variant like that as well.
Posted by David Cymbala at February 6, 2003 04:54 PM