Most of the time, I don’t have the time. But when a holiday comes around, I can pick up some thick books and mess around with command line interfaces, and learn a little more about the backend of the www.

One good place to do this was on textdrive. I learned a few things there that you don’t normally have to think about as a Cpanel user. Like, what’s putty? Or do I have shell access? As a veteran cpanel user I recall emailing the help desk at textdrive, requesting shell access. I thought they’d want to see my passport and everything. Hey dummy (they didn’t say) you’ve had shell access from the start.

OK, so slowly but surely I get a clue now and then. During the latest stretch of holiday I picked up an account at slicehost. And it turned out to be the coolest thing. With a small “slice” account, they let you pick your backend platform. I ended up with the latest version of Ubuntu. Then you grab a little putty and start making mistakes right away. But no problem here. Whenever you find that you wish you’d done something different, you just go back to your slice manager and “rebuild” the site, which tears everything down and puts up a fresh platform. I did that about a dozen times the first couple of days.

Finally, I got to the point where I could install wordpress on the platform that I’d built myself. But that’s bragging a little too much, because the Ubuntu package makes things really easy, once you get used to it.

For example, Ubuntu offers a single command that installs your Apache, MySQL, and PhP. OK, some people like to do each component at a time in order to get the settings just right. But from where I started, the LAMP installer worked fine (again, after trying it a couple of times and getting used to things).

After a few days I was about to give the whole thing up, because on my sixth install of the LAMP and wordpress, my browser was not showing a darn thing where wordpress should be. So I switched browsers. And joy! There it was. Turned out to be a browser caching issue. I flushed and restarted the first browser. Now I have my first Wordpress install “from scratch”.

This looks like a promising direction to go. But the holiday is coming to a close, and I have to get back to business soon. Now at this host, I can use a combination of cpanel along with command line activities. With subversion enabled, for example, I’ve been able to fly through a few wordpress sites and upgrade them very snappy.

Bottom line, even if you’re not a developer, I’d encourage you to take out a slice at slicehost. It could be a cool way to develop your publishing skills. And, if you’ve been a windows/cpanel user all your life, I think you’ll find that delightful things are happening along the Ubuntu front.

Finally, I was so impressed by Ubuntu that I used their windows installer Wubi to put a Ubuntu desktop on my Dell laptop (alongside Vista). Although the download time was lengthy, everything worked. I just clicked okay when presented with the defaults, and soon enough I was booting into my Ubuntu desktop. It sure feels like the future to me.

So how did you spend your holiday? Happy New Year 2009!