For my current Merlin’s Ball project in Fundamentals of Animation Online, I have been required to put together blog posts to document my process. I can see the value of this in sorting through existing and upcoming work and especially in relation to putting together a portfolio near the end of my schooling. The project does not require a “live” blog but rather just a couple of documents to be submitted throughout the project. I however, being far too zealous in my efforts to do something cool figured that it would be neat to build a blog and host it on my NAS. I currently have a ReadyNAS NV+ server with close to six terabytes of storage in raid and with the amount of traffic my blog is likely to receive I could see no reason not to want to host and build my own server.
What a mistake that was. I was working through the ReadyNAS guide for installing a wordpress server on the NAS, I had a working html server and wanted something a bit fancier. Unfortunately the ReayNAS guide has been rendered obsolete and would not work for me. At first the problem was that wordpress needed a newer version of PHP installed on the server, so it took me a little while to figure out, but eventually I updated the PHP server which then resulted in the MySQL being outdated and needing to be replaced and that is where things really got messy. Long story short I managed to disable the frontview application for the NAS, though I still have rootSSH capability, and the content is all still accessible. However as soon as I can get a new HDD to dump all the data onto I will be doing a factory reset and trying again with wordpress. In the meantime, I’ve thrown in the towel and resorted to using a free wordpress.com account for my blog, but one day my NAS will rise from the ashes like a glorious phoenix. And in that day my wordpress account will probably fall crashing into the ground as it usurped by a far more capable beast. At least so I hope.