Daniel Kokott

Hej alle,

Vi har måtte omlægge vores sites fordi det ikke længere var muligt at have en server kørende hos mine forældre længere efter de har fået TDC Trio. Derfor har vi også været offline i rigtig lang tid.

Nu har jeg besluttet at få det hele hosted hos WordPress.com istedet. Så behøver jeg heller ikke selv holde softwaren opdateret.

I løbet af nogle dage vil vi se om vi kan få de gamle posts overført til denne side. Vi mangler også lige at få Lutz online igen.

Vi har lige været offline fordi routeren var blevet resat efter en strømafbrydelse.

Nu er vi tilbage igen.

As you might have read in an earlier post, my iMac was off to service some month ago. So there I was: a whole month without my primary computer. The problems slowly arose. First of all, I wasn’t able to sync my iPod with new music or edit photos in Aperture. OK, that was expected. But I didn’t have my bookmarks, my RSS-feeds and no real access to my email or contacts. That I could do something about.

The bookmark issue was not really new. I have three computers and each of those have two or three browsers; Safari, FireFox, Internet Explorer and now Chrome. So it takes a lot of dicipline bookmarking in a way that enables you to find a certain bookmark again. And it’s annoying sitting at the office, not able to find that cool picture you saw some days ago. So I decided to convert the online social bookmarking service del.icio.us. Of the many cool features, the service has very powerful search and tagging capabilities, RSS-feeds of your bookmarks and some nice social functionality. And you can add non-shared personal bookmarks too.
It took me some time entering all my old bookmarks, but it was very much worth it. Now all my browsers have two bookmarks: my del.icio.us and save to del.icio.us. Very easy to use. You should give it a try and add me to your network.
Here are my bookmark feed: http://delicious.com/munkejens (feed).

I used to use Safari as my RSS-feed reader. I’m reading more RSS-feeds than regular webpages. News, reviews, music, games, blogs, flickr activity… all in RSS. But when I’m not at my iMac, eg. when it’s off to service, I’m confined to old manual surfing. So I registered all my feeds in Google Reader. Now I have my RSS-feeds with me everywhere. It makes those five minutes breaks at work much more effective. Again, theres powerful search capabilities, analytics tools, social functionality and much more. I really like the easy way to share items. Just click “share” and the item is added to your personal sharing page.
Here are my shared items: http://www.google.com/reader/shared/13554762555184197558 (feed).

Squirrelmail (version 1.4) is a decent piece of software and had served me well the few last years as webbased email client. It was only used when I didn’t have my own computer near me. It’s just not suited for everyday use. The interface is feeling old and less intuitive than Gmail – of which I’m quite a big fan. The contact functionality in Squirrelmail is neglectable. So I decided Squirrelmail was due for a replacement. Google had recently released their Google Apps and I was entrigued by the thought of Google hosting my emails.

Heres some of the pros by moving to Google Apps:

1. Intuitive userinterface
2. Easy administration
3. No software maintenance
4. No need for backup
5. Spam filter (huge plus)
6. Powerful search
7. Gmail huge range of different functionality, e.g. the mobile version, optional POP3 and IMAP.
8. Much better contact functionality.
9. The rest of the Google Apps. I like Google Docs, Talk and Calendar

So registrated my domain, created accounts for my family and changed the MX-records on my DNS-hosting service. Created some CNAME records pointing to ghs.google.com. Soon after http://mail.kokott.dk, http://docs.kokott.dk and http://calendar.kokott.dk was online.

I created accounts, aliases and folders and using Mozilla Thunderbird, I was able to move all email for all four account. Inbox, sent items, drafts etc. was easily moved to Gmail via IMAP. Moved all accounts on my family this way.
All in all it the transition to Google Apps Gmail was a breeze. Thank you Google, for yet another great application.

I have converted all my documents and spredsheets to Google Docs. I don’t need a complete Office-package for my personal stuff. From there, they are easy to search, manage, print, get PDF-versions. And everything is backed up and changes are tracked. Perfect.

With my old gallery based on Menalto Gallery moved to Flickr on a pro-account, theres not much soft running on my home server – only my fathers blog, my own blog and Prodigi. Well, my sisters blog too, but she really doesn’t use it. Guess Facebook serves her purpose nicely. Everything else is pretty much up in the cloud. I absolutely love Flickr.

Not sure what to do with my blog. It’s based on a local installations of WordPress.org and it has been my main site for years. I have it running on my Mac Mini G4 with Ubuntu Linux. It works like a charm. Actually there’s no real need to change anything. It serves my purpose. I’ve made a simpler and (in my opinion) cool theme. But the software maintenance is slowly becoming annoying – which is why I’m looking at alternative solutions. I might convert it to WordPress.com, but I tested an export-import of my blog and a lot of data gone missing. I’m just not ready to go through all those posts.
Blogger doesn’t have import from WordPress at all, so I had to start from scratch which seems even more tedious.
Been testing the two CMS-systems Drupal and Joomla, but not really found what I was looking for. I don’t really want to code my site or do a lot of maintenance. Otherwise I would never get to do actual content. Besides I’m coding and maintaining all day at work.
Sites like Vincent Laforet and Chase Jarvis are a dream, but I guess it costs much more in purchase, hosting contracts and development time than I would want it to.

Well, I’m quite happy where I am right now with my IT infratructure.

The old minimalistic layout has been changed. About time.
The logo was taken from the balcony one night as youngsters, selfproclaimed anachists and left-overs from Ungdomshuset was “tearing up the streets” in Copenhagen.

Boy, that was a long ride. Where have I been, you might ask and you’d be very much entitled to.

It started out with no emails being delivered right after I installed the webbased IMAP emailclient Roundcubemail. It must have altered some settings (even though I don’t suppose it ought to), because the delivery stopped mysteriously right after the install.

I tried tons a things to get these two working together but ended up wrecking my Exim installation.

Then I thought I this was a “perfect” time to upgrade from Ubuntu Hoary to Breezy. I was wrong. First the MySQL package for PowerPC had problems to which I, after much research, found no solution. I’m still not sure if it was the package or the upgrade that broke the database.
I then worked on getting Exim to work again but had no luck. I still don’t know what I did wrong. I was using more or less the same approach and setup as the first time. And Exim has been a very good solution. I tried Postfix and it worked almost “out of the box”. Nice. Email was back and email sendt in the downtime was being delivered from my mx-backup.
No loss, thank god.

By a chance I found that MySQL 4.1 is packaged seperately from 4.0, so I tried that package instead. And it worked. Phew, finally I could continue. Now WordPress told me that MySQL-support was missing in the PHP installation. That was wierd since PHPMyAdmin and Roundcubemail was working. The problem must then be WordPress-related. I figured this was a “perfect” time to upgrade from WordPress 1.5 to 2.0. Again I was wrong. The upgrade wouldn’t work even though I completely changed all WordPress files to the newest ones.
I then tried to alter Apache and PHP setup, only to render the whole website broken.

Long story short: After reinstalling and purging everything related to Apache, PHP, MySQL and the likes I was able to get back online. The cool thing is that the WordPress update was to quick and easy. I didn’t have to reuse anything from the old install besides the database and it was up working again after one click with the mouse using the upgrade script. Very impressive. Pages, links and posts are all preserved as I left it almost two weeks ago.

All that is missing now is the gallery. I need to find a way to make it work again without install from scratch. Propably just some file-permission issues after restoring from my backup.

Well, I’m just happy to be back online.