I had spent almost a week trying to get this site to work. I desperately needed a new blog site, at my last check I had like 4 different blog sites (teaching, development, personal, the development I didn't want students to find) and it was driving me crazy. I try to make it a rule that whenever I build a site I try something new, so I went searching for a good CMS framework to build around.

That's when I found Grav. It uses a twig, markdown, scss and a filesystem instead of DB. It also has a truly beautiful admin panel:

I built the template pretty quickly, abused a lot of the default options since it was pretty nice looking already. It only took about 3 hours until I was ready to push it to my server. But it took me 4 days.

• First up, htaccess didn't work. Whenever I had it on my server it just threw an internal server error. After a bunch of experimenting I discovered that it didn't like rewrite conditions that included GLOBAL or REQUEST. They were just security rules, so I thought maybe I could go ahead.
• Ok, so the htaccess should be working. But I'm getting forbidden errors. After hours of trying to fiddle with it, my girlfriend discovered that granting any permissions of worth to the group stopped my server from working at all.
• I have a blog! But.. none of the tags or pagination works at all. In fact, the only blogs you can visit are the most recent 5 because traveling to page 2 crashes the server...

  

It was here that I gave up on trying to make my server work. To be honest, I had been having trouble with the shared hosting for years, but always just found work arounds. I didn't have much control over it, so things like PDO were disabled, I couldn't alter many settings, my https was always just being a shit and my FTP constantly dropped out. Plus I couldn't really do anything fun with it? I really wanted to play around with node.js online, and that wasn't going to happen on this plan.

Wait... if I got a virtual private server... I could just... do whatever I want...

I had been avoiding this for a while. VPS cost something like an arm and a leg, the company I was already with was asking 100+ per month for a window box and windows was all I knew. However, a couple of big vps providers had new servers in singapore, and that was close enough to get some decent speeds out of. Sure, it was linux, but I needed to learn at some point. It was time to get my hands dirty.

I bought a server at linode, and excited at the prospect of having my own server I followed their guide to installing ubuntu on it and connecting to it. I found myself at a ssh terminal, staring at a command line. This was a new territory and I had no fucking idea what I was doing.

Ok, this isn't so bad. There are tutorials out there. I quickly had apache, mysql, php and node all installed on the server. I muddled through creating a new site and how the hell .conf worked. I got my site connected to my dns provider and within a day I had my own, privately hosted website. Oh happy days!

Things were still tough, I had no clue about setting up SSL authentification on it. But I got there (turns out self signing certificates, while sounding like an easier choice, are shit and not to be trusted). So welcome to Callie Co!