Various problems over the last few weeks/months have convinced me to try an experiment: I have moved Uncle Andrew dot Net off of a Windows XP/IIS box and onto an old Power Macintosh G4 Cube. I bought this thing off of a former co-worker of Margaret’s a year or so ago, and had been trying to find some use for it lest it continue to simply sit around gathering dust.

As it happens, I am just about fed up with the Internet Information Services experience….at least in the form that exists on the Windows XP Pro workstation platform, as it relates to the implementation of WordPress, my blogging software of choice. There are a cluster of heretofore unresolved issues with running WordPress under IIS 5, and every time the WordPress dev team gets around to squashing one bug, two more seem to pop up. As often as not, the answer to a call for help with an IIS install on the WordPress Support Forums is, “use Apache“.

I have little to complain about given that this software is provided to the public absolutely free—not so much as an ad or unsolicited  “complimentary” Yahoo! toolbar—so if the developers have trouble with or lack interest in making their ‘ware work with certain platforms, that is my tough titty. I’m sure that if I went out and spent seven to twelve hundred dollars for a copy of Windows 2008 Server, with its massively-revamped and tuned IIS 7, I would find it to be a much more robust and powerful a platform for Web development, blah blah blah. But I’m not trying to build a vast dotNet empire of interlinked Web applications and services; I just want to whine and kvetch from my own personal digital soapbox, with as few obstacles and difficulties as possible. WordPress and IIS 5 don’t provide that; WordPress and Apache do. So, a Cubin’ we will go….at least for the time being.

I’ve found getting back into the *nix swing of things to be relatively painless. I am by no stretch of the imagination a guru at any platform of Web server, but there is something about the straightforward, text-based nature of the Apache system that I find appealing. Just about everything you want to tweak in an Apache Web server can be found in the httpd.conf file, and every possible tweak can be found with about five minutes’ worth of Googling. Fuck something up? As long as you haven’t closed the document you’re editing, you can “Undo” your way back to the point just before the upfucking occurred and re-save it. Nothing much simpler than that. Also, I find that I understand the Terminal better than I do the Windows command line. Other than Windows’ extraordinarily straightforward batch-file scripting language, the Unix command line—and more particularly, the Macintosh iteration of same—just fits me better. Gotta learn more about scripting via the cli though, definitely.

Anyways, I am hoping that this changeover will solve the problems I have been experiencing with my IIS box, both myself in-house and with certain visitors’ ability to visit and use my server. Please let me know if you have any difficulties. We know you have your choice of blogs, and thank you for choosing Uncle Andrew dot Net.