Monday, February 7, 2011

We Have A Visual!

After a running battle with MySQL, PHP, and phpmyadmin, I'm happy to say I've got a working Gallery2 install going.  You can check it out at http://photos.visuallycreated.com if you'd like. At the moment, there's not a lot of content there, although I'll be moving over most (if not all) of my dA gallery shortly.  After that, I'll have to deal with about a year's backlog of photos, but many of those are already sorted in Picasa to a degree.

Some people (who either use Gallery themselves, or have way too much time on their hands) might question why I choose Gallery2 even though Gallery3 is now released and stable.  The short answer is familiarity. I've used Galley2 before, I know how it works and, more importantly, how it fails.  Given that I didn't have firsthand experience with most of the rest of the software stack in use, removing a variable seemed sensible.  It also made configuration a lot faster, as I already knew what I wanted and how to get there.

Having completed this, a lot of the back end for anything else web-facing I care to install is now in place. Apache/MySQL/PHP is the framework for a tonne of things, and most of the hard work there is done. I'm not sure how much of it overlaps with other planned projects though (diaspora I think runs on Ruby, and IRC and mail servers might at most use MySQL).  We'll see what's left to do as the time comes!

Saturday, January 29, 2011

Carving A Niche

If you've come across this, odds are good you know me either online (probably as PhoenixEnigma), or in real life (as Mike).  If you don't, maybe this is a good chance to change that! 

A little more about myself:  I'm a guy living in central Canada, currently 23 years old, working in the support area of telecommunications and towards a B. Sc. in computer science. I also enjoy photography, good coffee, urban exploration, late night conversations, and tinkering with things.

That brings us, in a roundabout way, to what this is. VisuallyCreated.com is my attempt to carve out my own niche on the internet.  I've got some domain names and a VPS, and I like the idea of my friends and I having our own little corner of the internet to call home - a place a little out of the way, a little less populated, to kick back, relax, and enjoy ourselves.  It's also liable to be an interesting hobby and a good way to learn new things.  This blog serves as a place to post updates, changes and additions to that project.


This blog predates pretty much anything on VC itself by a bit.  There's already a streaming radio service - hosted off of another server - that is related to a community I'm a part of, but that's it.  That is on a sub-domain, but I don't have a terrible amount to do with that, even it fits the ethos of the project anyways.  In the near future, I plan to set up an online gallery here, and shortly thereafter both mail and IRC servers (yes, some of use still use IRC, and we like it that way!)   Next in line is probably a Dispora seed.  After that, I don't know yet.