After a bit of back-and-forth with the host, a new gallery has been installed and configured :-) Still no shell access, but at least things are working. I even managed to resurrect the old gallery. All the photos and captions were recovered!

Now it’s time to see if I can migrate the albums to the new gallery. . .

So much for travel sites being the end-all for all your reservation needs. I have finalized my Austin apartment preview for September (a week after ACL, to avoid the unwashed masses ;-) for over $150 dollars cheaper by doing it piece-wise and not choosing a package ‘deal’.

I needed a flight, a car, and a place to sleep for three nights and four days. Orbitz quoted me $561, Travelocity quoted me $534, and Priceline quoted me $510. My price? $360

To make things fair, I’m staying in a hostel instead of a hotel. However, had I made reservations at a cheap hotel (cheap is $50/night, I guess), my price would have been $450, still cheaper than the best quote from these bargain sites.

I suppose using a Denver-based discount carrier (Frontier) and buying directly from them is an advantage since a reseller cannot beat their price. And some diligent car searching revealed that there are weekend rates and weekday rates. Apparently the business pukes pay more than double to drive during the week. And the trump card is most certainly the hostel, which is less than half the cost of a standard hotel.

The one advantage that bargain sites have for them is that everything is taken care of all-at-once. No making sure each part will work and fit together. It just will. Saves a lot of time and some stress. But I sure like my $150!

Uf. Web apps are buggy and finicky, and getting this persnickety software to play nicely on a host where you have very little control (I mean, not even a shell!) is like getting America to have public health care (everyone hates you and then someone ends up dying in the process).

I have more or less successfully installed WordPressMU here at blogs.meriwi.net. It’s been up for a month and didn’t collapse when I added my old entries from the forum. However, a lot of WordPress themes aren’t compatible (even if you choose from the WPMU-approved ones :-\). And that’s just cosmetics. Further into the mess are plugins — little tools and tweaks that make a blog easier or better. Plugins for WordPress don’t necessarily work with WPMU. Ones that do work may only partially work. For example, Spam Karma 2 and OWA install and activate but won’t do anything other than that. No functionality, no configurability, just wasted bits in a folder and wasted tables in a database on a RedHat server in Omaha (more on them later).

Also, during the last long period of disuse, the old gallery appears to have suffered from bit entropy (or bit atrophy?). The albums are completely corrupted and cannot be viewed. The photos are still safe and organized, but the software prevents you from looking at them. The descriptions and comments are there but more-than-likely unrecoverable (at least without a considerable effort). So I went about finding a replacement. A few Internet searches brought me to a nice Gallery plugin for WordPress, and digging a little deeper, I even found that it had been adapted to work with WPMU. But the elation faded to deflation when I read comments from users saying that it doesn’t work with version 1.2.1 (which is what I’ve installed since it was the latest and most bug-free). Like most poorly organized bazaar-style software, updating the core application will break those that depend on it.

Ok, fine. So I decided to install Gallery independently and not have it integrated with WPMU. Without a shell, the upload is very long (over 1 hour on broadband). Strike against the host. Setting up the database went fine, but a shell (rather than Plesk) would really help make it more exact. The installation has ballooned to an 11-step process (to be fair, while Gallery 1 had only three pages, they were three very long pages), and I get stuck on step 2. Cookies aren’t working. I do the proper searching and find a few support threads describing my problem and follow their links. None of their ‘make sure that naninani is nanika’ fit — I either am using a recent enough version, or the tools are properly configured. No dice.

So, before really hitting it hard and wasting effort, I decided to try using the host’s “site application” installer. It’s still gallery, but it’s a little older and buggier. To do that, though, I need to remove the previous (and failed) installation. Oh joy, another 1-hour wait while 3300 files are deleted over ftp. Once removed, the new installation went smoothly but is broken. And now the hands are flung above the head.

What does all of this mean? More headaches. I’ll probably go back to the latest version of Gallery and start talking with the developers and the host to figure out what the exact problem is. But this exchange shouldn’t be necessary at all. The host has us locked down rather tight. And they’re using Red Hat. Just because enterprise is in the name does not make it preferable. I would like to see them offer debian-based hosting. And a shell. And a lot more flexibility (like the permissions in my own directory — root owns a lot of things I would prefer to control).

Basically, I’m becoming dissatisfied with the host. And I’m frustrated at the lack of maintainable design in web software (it makes more sense to me that WPMU be the primary focus of the WordPress folks — it solves the more general problem since a single blog is a subset of WPMU’s capabilities). And I regret choosing WPMU in the first place. I don’t really see any other blogs joining mine here, so installing as many single WordPress copies as are needed makes more sense to me. And I still am thinking about getting my own host. And that’s a whole lot of fun — how can you figure out the good from the bad?