This took a surprisingly large amount of effort to get setup how I wanted, but still not as much effort as I would have expended making this entire thing using tools such as asp.net, PHP, and Google’s web design thing that I can’t remember the name of anymore. There are still a few kinks to work out though, for example the infini-scrolling feature I have enabled on my blog and projects pages breaks my footer. I should have most of the issues sorted out soon enough though.

One thing that actually surprised me a bit was how many ‘hackers’ were trying to access my server after I setup WordPress and my domain name. Within 3 hours of my server being live I had 4 different people try to brute force my login in different ways. If you ever setup your own WordPress server, I highly recommend that you setup security before you do anything at all, linking your domain name included, because otherwise you might be opening yourself up to all kinds of trouble. Right now to help secure my website I’m using Wordfence and Jetpack, though I am having both handle different things. So far my experience with them has been pretty good, and Wordfence has blocked several thousand bad access attempts already.

On a slightly related note, I am really irritated with Weebly today. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m fairly certain they used to have a button to export your website, or at least the content of it, in the settings menu next to the unpublish button. Yesterday when I tried to export all of my images and other content to move to a self-hosted WordPress instance I could not find it anymore. I really like Weebly’s setup, in fact I prefer how building pages works on their site to WordPress, but not being able to move to a new host easily is something that is a major problem with their service. I no longer have access to the original copies of many of the images I have on my Weebly site, and I’m hoping that I’ll be able to recover them all fine. It’ll probably take some time though, from what I can tell I’ll need to go through and manually download each image.

Anyways, its been a while since I hosted my own web server, so hopefully I haven’t forgotten anything too important. I had a hell of a time getting FastCGI and apache working with WordPress at first, most of it was because I actually forgot how to enable FastCGI, but it likely didn’t help that I was using Webmin to set things up for the first time ever. Speaking of Webmin, I really enjoy having a solid web interface to manage server configuration. As well, thanks to Hetzner.de for their great hosting services, the prebuilt Debian LAMP installation option made getting the server setup a breeze.