Kevin's Blog

All blog entries reflect the opinions of the author and have not been expressly endorsed by the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts or the Georgia Institute of Technology.

There are a few lessons that I learned before I came to the Ivan Allen College that have benefited me greatly in my first few months with the college.  One of them is that it's far easier to do web development if you set up your own LAMP server and host all of your development sites in one place.

My LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server is a very straightforward setup with virtual hosting enabled.  I use a standardized directory tree structure where each virtual host gets its own directory with subdirectories for its httpdocs and logs.  Anything private that goes along with that particular website gets its own directory off of that main directory, thus keeping everything for a website in one place.  A series of directory aliases (soft links) simplifies the task of navigating amongst all of these sites.

All blog entries reflect the opinions of the author and have not been expressly endorsed by the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts or the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Here in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts (IAC), we have at least 150 websites to take care of when you include all of the test and dev sites along with a few servers that house custom web applications, and of that number 35 are Drupal sites, 22 of which I have some level of direct responsibility for maintaining.

Even at twenty-two sites, it's very challenging to keep up with the required regular maintenance, and with my being the first IAC college-wide web developer, there were no standards in place before I arrived.  So, I kind of had my work cut out for me.  On one hand, I had something of a clean slate on which to develop plans for handling everything into the future.  On the other hand, I had to do a lot of ground work just to get a good sense of what was out there and what state it was in.