Webmasters Blog - Salem-News.com

Shortly before noon on October 22 I was reading an newsletter from spaceweather.

The Luxury Cruise to Mars advertisement caught my attention, I had to click on it but if you’ll notice the

www.example.com

Is not a valid domain name. Clicking on it will lead to this:

You have reached this web page by typing "example.com",
"example.net",
or "example.org" into your web browser.

These domain names are reserved for use in documentation and are not available
for registration. See RFC
2606, Section 3.

Is this Google running a test, a customer running a test.

I wanted to add a 3d corner effect to the posts displayed on the front page of this blog to give it less of a plain flat page. I created a quick drop shadow image with the GIMP and with a quick alteration of my templates CSS had it up.
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Well I got my blogs started and moved out of the main directory and into subdomains me designs.salem-news.com David tech.salem-news.com the rest sharing opinion.salem-news.com.

It went well after relearning how to set up virtual hosts for the sub-domains as I havn’t done that in a few months.

httpd.conf partial
# Use name-based virtual hosting.
#Remember to uncheck this
NameVirtualHost *:80
#

Then repeat this for each virtual host

<VirtualHost *:80>
DocumentRoot “/path/to/matts/blog”
ServerName designs.salem-news.com
<Directory “/path/to/matts/blog”>
allow from all
Options +Indexes
#mod_rewrite for wordpress
  <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
   RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
  </IfModule>
</Directory>
</VirtualHost>

After installation I began editing the default wordpress theme (as I decided the first one of us to get a blog should be me for testing purposes)

The basic changes done from within the administration section was fairly easy. If I was willing to set my permissions correctly I could edit more deeply from within the administration as all template files can be edited but I prefer to do that myself.

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Over the past 24 hours I have tried a few blogging / CMS packages to allow Salem-News.com staff members to write more what they feal instead of just regurgitating the usual news.

While I did find several with more features than WordPress I ended up going with it as the winner. The one I really wanted was still too buggy (and is not quite blogging) and would take far more time than I have to get running properly (Will discuss in another post.) Read the rest of this entry »