layout: post title: Tips for Andy created: 1080526813 categories:

• Personal Publishing
• Mac

Andy is just about ready to start running a personal publishing system of some kind. He's going to run it off his Mac at home for now, so he wanted a couple of pointers.

First off, don't bother with a static IP address from your broadband provider. It's absolutely not necessary. I pointed him to EasyDNS for domain registration and dynamic DNS. On the Mac, combine that with DNSUpdate. This is very reliable and has worked great for me.

Andy spent all day look into various open source content management systems. He looked at the Open Source CMS site and in particular mentioned Angeline CMS. I don't know much about the app other than it doesn't come up very often when you search for it with Google, which is never a good sign.

I'm pretty blunt these days: use WordPress if you want a basic blog, choose Drupal if you need more features, control, and options.

Then we were talking about hosting more than one domain, or at least different sites for sub-domains (e.g. subdomain.example.com). I remembered I enabled virtual hosts on my Mac before, so I dug out the relevant bits from my httpd.conf file. I've written that up in a how-to called Enabling Dynamically Configured Name-based Virtual Hosting on Mac OS X.